The Level of Town

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sestina

An early attempt at a sestina, just to give me some focus for writing. I left off the tercet, because rules are made to be broken. This poem is about Reston Town Center, and was written about five years after it was first built.

The Level of Town

The uniform trees along Market Street
Border to the edge of an ancient wood
Where walnuts and acorns once kept sleeting
Skies posted from the quick death of fall,
Where red-backed squirrels were once pregnant shoppers
For December’s hunger and January’s vacant fill.

Under rain one thinks more of fish markets filled
With ice stands and awnings over wetted streets-
Not these specialty shops for specialty shoppers.
One sees wharf and shipping, grained wood
Chopping blocks and men marking packages with the fall
Of scales- not these smiles, this social sleet.

This February, over hotel and office, real sleet
Gripped the towers like a white taffy filling
Until rust-edged horns began to fall
And they closed frightened Market Street.
They tried to pass the smashed pots and cracked wood,
While only stone broken art sold in gallery shops.

Now, heat and foul wet pushes summer shops
To sell iced coffee in tumblers fogged to sleet,
Pregnant squirrels and frogs cut from drift-wood.
Bored marketers empty shelf and rack to fill
Windows, or send coupon girls into the burning street.
Girls to push limp tickets for sales this fall.

For weeks, quick headed jack-hammers lift and fall
Along the weight of cars and waiting shops.
Tar and brick has worn sleepy thin on this street
From years of eastern traffic and winter sleet.
Mask faced crews squat and graveled holes fill
With their cement and sinew, burnt-rock and heart-wood.

And always. Always, on the edge, the deciduous wood
Bows waiting, fire orange in fall,
In spring, city block and forest fill
With tokens, some food for their pregnant shoppers.
City and forest humble each year with drooping sleet-
The wood a wood, the street a battered two-way street.

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Of course, the wood is gone now- it is condos and high rise towers. It will be woods again one day.