When Lucinda turned 40, we went to a haka
for a birthday celebration, and this is a poem
that came out of that trip.
And I had fun messing with the end words,
varying the end words.
Most of you know the sestina has six end
words that repeat in a different pattern in each stanza.
The six original words are "house", "tourists", "cans",
"marigolds", "bugs", and "range".
But they go a little postal.
And I should say, the guardian, formal guardian, of this poem
is Elizabeth Bishop-- her beautiful "Sestina"
about the little girl in the house in Nova Scotia.
"Sestina."
"March sunlight falls on the weaver's house,
the glare too much for tourists who rub their brows with Coke
cans while the merchant explains marigolds
for yellow, acacia seed for black, bugs
off a cactus, crushed to make a range of colors--
purple, rose, gold, and orange.
We'd come to get away from our houses, two artists barely
containing what bugs us about domestic life,
feeling like tourists in our own houses, the demands,
gold standard of stability, but making us ask,
can we stick it out?
So we left for a week, canceled the shopping and chores
to range around the Valley of Oaxaca,
eat marigold flavored chicken--
the locals souse the birds by feeding them flowers--
tourists savoring the new, though we
drew the line at bugs, giant bowls
of fresh-fried, chili red chapulines
women taunted us to buy.
Can we just elbow our way through the tourist throng,
we'd say with our eyes, ranging glances
through the crowded market for an exit plan.
House hungry, we retired to Las Golondrinas,
where marigolds and bougainvillea flavored
our sleep.
Gold can even be leeched from onion skins, a bag
I saved and boiled--
yarn like copper-- in our Vermont house,
years back when you were small and I your 'can I do
this' mother, uncertain I was fit for any range of maternal
duties, but certain I wouldn't act the tourist in taking
on the task.
By tourist I mean one who dabbles and gawks,
gold digging for sensations and souvenirs;
no range rider in the open country of love would I be.
Begs the question of what I am now at sixty, candling myself
like an egg to see what's housed inside the shell.
I can boast that both of us are a whole, a gold star or two
for women who take art into their homes
and find it doesn't tear them apart or up.
Still working out the bugs.
Life is strange."