Suitcase Tina - Utica Sestina (write-through)

A long-boned boy gliding in rain

beneath the rise or fall, any weather
in the city he'd sometimes sight

rolling in at the river bend, clock
and lightly the years he faced alone,

locked passing tense into the tall
tethered tracks impaled by falling

rain. A loner running the hail green
face, present sense this tense ticked,

each busy hand passing an empty store
window of absence Dad glanced at;

groceries amassed and many white washed
facts faced by a dad who cannot change

his mind, running miles, varying in pace
and others behind others in his mind,

the clock ticked. He knew the miles
father, the way his knee used to slow

at the store counter, his pals who’d tab
with him, run up tabs with him;

they never fell beneath a broken sage
displayed the memory escaping bent

in failure, to mend the broken self
themselves, rent beneath a broken clock

time held still yet drew no light from.
Store a night of memory away in it

running neither towards nor in retreat
but with a river's rhythmical defiance,

time chosen cool clean and falling, air
the world we can not bend eternal, cool

hearted word the water tock cleaned
so a harmless trickster no-nice father

knew, neither stood nor fell, but
chose an exile place. Mere it is

this son who saw the years wend
in failure, yet never broke, dumb

one's defiant faith in the clock ticked,
elsewhere the trick that out did time,

runs father.

~

After spending the last two months working at the write-through form, the out come is i am getting quicker at doing it.

It is much harder than writing in meter, or rather, it is as challenging as writing the most difficult metrical pieces, as the "rules" of these two forms, though at opposite ends of the compositional spectrum, are perfectly complimentary as we are exercising at a similar psychic pitch when shuffling the original texts for a write-through, into something else. I am learning at a deep level, though am still to close to the process to articulate it intellectually. Going by experience, in a few months i will be laying out this phase in the oeuvre. But the one salient fact is, we can only plod on.

This is the original text, taken from a ten star ablemuse poster:

Here