Having completed the fingertrap sestina promised in my last entry, one must ask: “Well? Did it work?”
In the end, this is a question for readers, but from the writing end, I’m satisfied with the creation, though now wondering where else it might go.
My two speakers, each friends considering their winter surrounds and their estranged friendship, find themselves in different places to begin their respective columns of verse, but then–unsurprising since they share an envoi–merging their own questions, forming a sort of mutual ironic position.
Along the way, too, they share their six cycling pairs of words:
- Whirling / Still
- Cold / Thaw
- White / Dark
- Crisp / Dull
- Dreary / Clear
- Draft / Close

Turning the Words
Too, I think some tensions form in the relationships between these pairs. For instance, is the world hopeful for its imperviousness to drafts or are drafts refreshing? Do we hold ourselves too “closed” to communicate, or is that closeness a lost beauty? Whether or not they communicate across the poem for readers, I felt them in the composition.
The draft here is a second version, not yet completed, I think, but this is mostly because I see more opportunities still from the form.

Pulling on Relationships
In designing my speakers, I placed one inside trying to write a reconciliation; the other is outside seemingly refreshed from escaping that too-closed antagonism. One dwells deeply on the failing and finds himself simultaneously defensive and despairing; the other rationalizes escape, though still finds images of stubborn grasses that stir his heart. As time passes and each age, chapter after chapter closing, we are left with the final pair, “whirling still,” which leaves the poem unresolved.
The “fingertrap” pulls each more tightly to the other, even as the words demonstrate impotency or denial. As long as they each continue in their infirm resistance to reconcile, the trap is complete. But, like the puzzle itself, if either would take a step in the direction of the other, releasing that tightness between them, they each might be “freed.”
Certainly the poem comments on friendship, on pride or ego, on age and surrender, on memory and accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More. But somehow it finds the means to touch on other topics along the way. I think this comes primarily from the character sketches I created before writing, but honestly, the cycling of words and the links between stanzas pushed me in directions I had not originally considered. The first speaker spends some of his time decrying the state of a world, icy and without compassion or thought. And our second speaker slides into reverie and memory of lost times. These might seem off topic if the “dreary” in lines 18b and 19b didn’t link his childhood nostalgia to the broken friendship. And the coldness of the world our first speaker claims seems mirrored by his own “bitter white shards,” though his “crisp words, he says, are an effort to arrest absurdity.


Questions Ahead
What I am less certain of, right now, is how evident all this is, structurally. In other words, how much of the content work are the words doing vs. what the structure itself is doing? And if the structure is working well, how much can I lean on it in future poems to build and develop these tensions?
Could I have speakers with apparently nothing in common, that speak on differing topics, but with whom we find more thematic parallels through the shared cycling of pairs? Or a single speaker of two minds; or a single speaker at different times in their lives; or one who made two different choices? Could there be three speakers?
More, how much could the lines across from one another be calls and response or even offer some coherence if read fully left to right? Is there room for a mirroring envoi at the poem’s beginning?

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