Villanelles

This year at the poetry retreat our leader was Alabama poet Jeanie Thompson, author of several collections of poetry including The Seasons Bear Us. For our first session, Jeanie led us in an exercise that had us drawing the floor plan of the first home we remembered, and then situating various memories in its grid and writing about them. Once we had that raw material distilled, we could try presenting it in open form poetry (free verse) or in some traditional poetic form such as the pantoum, the sestina, or the villanelle. These are exacting forms with strict specifications and quite a bit of repetition of lines, giving a haunting hypnotic effect.

In my day I have written heaps of sonnets, mainly love poems to Dick Thistle, the boy I fell in love with on October 17, 1967, and persecuted with my love for years. I called him Apollo and wrote him sonnets under that name. But I had never tried my hand at any of these other forms to which Jeanie introduced me.

Here is my first-ever villanelle. The villanelle has stanzas of three lines, in an ABA rhyme scheme, with an alternating repetition in each stanza of line 1 and line 3. The final stanza has four lines, concluding with both 1 and 3. The hard part is finding enough rhymes for the A lines to keep the thing going without making it sound forced and clunky.

Note: this is NOT a memory inspired by the floor plan of my childhood home!

Back Then

This is the kind of thing I used to say.

If we are still together in the spring

His arms around me as I face away,

We’ll take a trip to Florence or Vevey.

His finger bare from his third wedding ring.

This is the kind of thing I used to say.

We’ll be the last to leave the small café

As strolling serenaders stop to sing.

His arms around me as I face away.

We’ll picnic on goat cheese and Chardonnay

If this is more than just a passing fling.

This is the kind of thing I used to say.

We’ll watch the fading sky turn blue to gray

As campanile bells begin to ring.

His arms around me as I face away.

We’ll spend a year, a month, or just a day,

If we are still together in the spring.

This is the kind of thing I used to say

My arms around him as he turned away.