Sestina for My Father

The once green yard is littered with squirrels
whose only crime was a taste for bright green walnuts,
now littering the floor of the house behind locks
jammed with scraps of metal broken off by my father.
Every day he barricades himself inside the scraps of sanity
that still remain to him. Inside, the house

smells like the den of some animal, a house
where the attic would never tempt squirrels
to save walnuts or acorns against any insanity
winter might bring, although even now walnuts
litter the attic in small heaps my father
has left behind. This is the way he locks

the present in place against a past he locks
inside himself. Despite his best efforts, the house
plots against him, whispering secrets my father
chooses not to hear. But dead squirrels
litter the yard like fallen walnuts,
and my father tries to buttress his sanity

within a litany of remembered wrongs. His sanity
has always been a matter he locked
away from us, covering himself with a walnut
shell of confidence. But this time the house
is a shambles, the bodies of dead squirrels
a testimony to insanity that even my father

has trouble ignoring. He remembers his own father
marshaling fleets of Buicks and Caddies against insanity.
Outside the house the fleet of dead squirrels
arrayed around the yard become locks
holding my father against his will in this house
he has carefully provisioned with walnuts.

Now, looking at the scattered walnuts
littering each room of the house, my father
begins to realize that even this house,
his home, can no longer protect his sanity.
At night he dreams of complex deadlocks,
but too soon the dream dissolves as squirrels

slip in to grab walnuts, and the shreds of sanity
become a dream my father wants desperately to lock
outside the house, outside with all those squirrels.

– Bill Stifler

This poem was originally published in Vol. 11 (2011) of Compass Rose.

A sestina is a poem of 39 lines. The first six stanzas each contain six lines all ending with the same six words. The order of the words ending the lines changes in a set pattern with each stanza. The last three lines of the poem are a separate stanza where the six words are again repeated, three at the end of the lines and three in the middle. Some writers use variations on the six words (which I have done here). Others use six rhymes rather than six words as the pattern of repetition. Often, writers will include the six words elsewhere in the poem in addition to the patterned repetitions (which I also do in this poem). Because of the repetition of words, the sestina lends itself to poems addressing obssessions.

This poem is based on a situtation in my father’s life that actually happened (and which became the basis for my initial six words). After the first stanza, I let the pattern of repetitions suggest the evolution of meaning in the poem. In the end, the “father” in the poem becomes a composite of his personality and my own imagination so that the final result goes beyond his individual circumstances and feelings while, I hope, at the same time offers a sense of what mental illness can be like.

Appointment in Samarra

The Grim Reaper
is my guardian angel
saving me 1000 times
from certain death.

No doubt the times she
lifted me from danger
meant the saving of some
other neglected life.

Her soft touch
sends exquisite pain
radiating through my body
promising that final ecstasy
when the church bells will ring
and the veil will be lifted
and we embrace at last.

–Bill Stifler, 2017

The Revelation

Last time it came in waves
of screams slipping into depths
immeasurable, darkness smothering
hope and hate, love and larceny—no
matter—only slow rocking time
remaining beneath a darkened sky.

Then, a promise of fire, bright orange,
suns exploding, the moon bloody, always
more blood, the sacrifice of innocents,
foolish lambs led to slaughter by wolves
rising out of the northern winter,
all promises forgotten—or misremembered—
the abomination of desolation at last revealed.

Still, hope clings to flotsam carried on rivers
of fire, the rapture’s final embrace carrying
them to the promised land of gnashing teeth.

— Bill Stifler, 2016

Cento: Lines from Mandelstam

Where to start?
No one word’s better than another;
Here, taking form, is the first draft.

The air trembles with similes,
And sometimes the air is dark as water.
You can’t get out of it, and it’s hard to get in.

The breast of the sea breathes tranquilly,
And all the seas of the world lie open,
but it’s a hard sail, and the same stars everywhere.

Time gnaws at me like a coin,
Stirs itself from long sleep on the harsh avenues,
Hangs above the damned abyss.

Never mind if our candles go out.
Ahead of us we’ve only somebody’s word,
And there’s not even enough of me left for myself.

I have forgotten the word I wanted to say.
Everything’s happened before and will happen again.
What I’m saying now isn’t said by me.

I have studied the science of good-byes.
Who can tell from the sound of the word ‘parting’?
Memory, are those your voices?

– Bill Stifler

A cento is a patchwork collage of lines taken from other works. All of the lines from this poem are taken from translations of various poems by Osip Mandelstam from a 1987 world poetry text compiled by Richard Jackson for ENGL433 at UT Chattanooga. I wrote the poem while taking the class and recently edited it.

The Carpenter’s Son

He must have grown anxious as the sun gave way
to stars and darkness and bitter cold,
blamed himself for not pushing them harder,
for his inadequacy, his poverty, the thin
rags his wife drew tighter against the chill.
The night filled with distant stars;
the cold cracked his hands gripping the reins,
and he forced the mule another mile, then another,
around them the desolate emptiness of fields,
a few stray sheaves of winter wheat.

The dream must have seemed only that, a dream,
and he must have been afraid, afraid for his wife,
the child she carried, afraid of the night, the cold,
the empty loneliness they traveled.
Perhaps he cursed, softly, under his breath,
softly, so his wife would not hear, softly,
so the stars would not hear,
and he jerked the reins harder,
hearing his wife’s silent whisper of pain.
And then, the lights of the town,
the promise of shelter,
warmth, a hot meal, a soft bed.

In town–faces at the doors–
each repetition a reminder of his failures,
until finally, at the far edge of town,
he accepted the small charity of a stable,
glad at last for a few frostbitten blades
of grass, anything to answer
the fear in Mary’s eyes,
the pain–

His hand caught the baby as it came,
His blade severed this life from its mother,
this baby, like any baby, dark-haired,
dark-eyed, so like its mother.
Did he smile as she nursed his first-born son;
did he whisper to himself, “This is my son”?

Then, what were his thoughts
when the shepherds came,
when the dream surrounded him?
Did he kneel with them
or stand forgotten in the shadows
as gnarled hands claimed
the child that was his?

                          –Bill Stifler

© 1996, Bill Stifler. At the time I wrote this, I had been memorizing poems by Richard Wilbur. I would like to think his style influenced this poem.

For the Love of Christ

They are quick to push Christ
back into Christmas, these
religious zealots who condemn
homosexuals and abortionists,
liberals and atheists,
having hitched the Christmas star
to the Republican party of Christ,
forgetting Christ was born to out of town
visitors so poor a manger offered shelter,
to a carpenter and his much younger wife,
a tradesman, who worked with his hands.
They forget Christ chose the poor
as his disciples, chastised the religious,
tossed out the money changers quick
to make a buck off religious piety,
dined with prostitutes, the destitute,
political outcasts, the socially improper,
and, most importantly, have forgotten
his condemnation of the self-righteous,
so certain of the rightness of their causes
that they condemned Him to die on a cross,
a cross resembling the first Greek letter
for the Messiah, commemorated in Xmas.

                                                            –Bill Stifler

© 2012, Bill Stifler