POEMS

Two Sestinas

The Falling Pins

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Illustration by John Gruen
Creative

The falling pins were braided and I tied them in a knot.

I tied them with the contour lines around your legs and map.

You didn't know where you were, at the precipice you were lost.

The falling, braided, tied up pins fell to the shear line of the lock.

At the top, the pins all flush, you couldn't help but tumble.

You tried to read it vertical, you tried in vain to read your compass.

 

Apparently drawn by iron ore, the needle will point north in a compass.

A trucker's hitch is like a pulley, a three to one ratio in a knot.

All alone in wilderness, it's easy to be confounded by your savior map.

Just the two of us in wilderness, we'll have no trouble getting lost.

You could drill it quickly if you didn't care; it's better to pick a lock.

If you have: quiet hands; a locksmith's tools; patience you can make a deadbolt tumble.

 

Forty foot contour lines catch at you as you tumble,

they spin about you topographically, you can get no bearing from your compass.

Your fall is fueled by gravity; your fall tightens the knots.

Now in the depths of canyon lands, you've a torn and tangled map.

Tangled in the lines, of canyons' hands, your map shows only that you're lost.

 

You hope now that I might fall too, a braided pin in a canyon's lock.

You hope now, that in our braided state, the pins might all fall in this lock,

that the crossing strands of avalanche spring-pin and gravity will tumble.

Would you trade your tools for that, your magnets and your compass?

Would you present your wrists as well, to be tied in contoured knots?

And to show me clearly where you were, would you set fire to your maps?

Or, would you rather work alone, towards the extremes of found or lost?

 

Elevation is sometimes the difference between found and lost.

Six is a standard number of pins found in a lock.

If you align all six with a key or a rake of a drill bit, it is easy to make the lock tumble.

With a bowl of water; some cork; a sewing needle you can make a compass.

Imagine, for a moment, your life without a single knot.

Now imagine learning to tie complex knots from maps.

 

Now I see you've set the fires, you guide me with your maps.

From my elevated look out, I see the difference between found and lost.

From here, above the canyon floor, I can set the pins flush in the lock.

From above they fall, all pins, all flush, all set to one they tumble.

Without a need for north or south, we have no need for their compass.

Please take these fallen, braided pins, please tie them in a knot.

 

The compass needle's bent awry, tied into a knot.

In the cinders of your signal maps, there is no knowing if we're lost.

The contoured pins are fallen to, the cylinder tumbles in the lock

-Nicolas Moore

Sestina Americana

Once upon a horse

I rode through the Sabbath

So far it seemed London,

But the bars still played Hank Williams

And in the air narcolepsy

Had the electricity of a poem.

 

I sat to a poem

As if breaking a horse

With a history of narcolepsy.

On some honky-tonk Sabbath

I imagined seeing Hank Williams

Naked at a peep show in London.

 

Where but in London

Can you write a decent poem

about Hank Williams?

The drunks in the White Horse

Are equating the Sabbath

With a savage narcolepsy.

 

O! The bliss of narcolepsy,

The sensation that London

Is heavy beneath a great sabbath

Of light, the Queen reading a poem

That will be branded onto the horse

Given to the estate of Hank Williams,

 

The last couplet reading: "Hank Williams,

Singer, diplomat ,/ victim of narcolepsy,

Cowboy poet." Every horse

In every formal square of London

Is reading a desperate poem

Lamenting the eternal Sabbath

 

Of marble and bronze. 'Sabbath'

Meant very little to Hank Williams,

Who once wrote a poem

That implicated the narcolepsy

Of God himself in London's

Burning, and worshipped a horse.

 

In the sense that a poem is also a sabbath,

So too is a horse the ghost of Hank Williams'

Narcolepsy dragging itself around London.

-William Hubbard

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