Reluctant Sestina.BY SHARON DOLIN
of things, though more of a tease to end when just start- ing. To get down on your knees for such a project? Better to read and lunch, put up your feet and wait in your chemise for the mail to come, forget all other burdens, reasons, strivings, tramp- le them. After failing to fail tramp off to a bookstore (your modern grail) in the middle of middle age you've come to this formal jail to forget what you might otherwise have start- ed. And in this line there now flail five dull feet. Don't derail your reader, instead project your voice, your mind, like an out-of-focus you project- ed on a screen, while rhymes as on a tramp- oline bounce from line to line on feet as unsteady as the half-blind taste of middle- brow readers. In a bind, Don't get me start- ed, you'll opine, as with repetends you sink into forget- fulness. But once you've gone this far, forget going back or giving up as your son shoots project- iles at you for fun that make you start up from your chair (he's already on the run), tramp into his getaway room, slip on a crayon in the middle of the floor, and spy under the bed a pair of feet sticking out. And is it cheating if I switch from feet to feat, from you to I? Would you, impatient reader, find forget- table (now that we've beaten the middle) if I slipped up on the project introduced mistakes that might tramp- le this already bumpy form so you'd be start- led? How many hyphenated words to start or end a line? Would you stamp your feet (at such a feat)? and walk away? A poem about nothing: no tramp, no dame or dude in distress except the poem to forget? Who wouldn't be bored by such a project? Perhaps you're undeterred by no middle in the middle. Now, let's both forget this project and trample under our feet what was never middle but ended at the start!
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