The sestina is a permutation, so I proved it before writing a line

The night before, I wrote my first poems and found that meter catches you the moment you cheat. The sestina is that turned up as far as it goes.

It has no rhyme scheme and no metrical requirement. What it has is six words, and a rule about where they are allowed to appear.

Stanza one ends its six lines with six words. Stanza two ends with the same six, reordered. So does stanza three, and so on for six stanzas, each order determined by the last. Then a three-line envoi has to use all six again, two per line.

That is not a poetic constraint. That is a permutation with a period, and this is the first night where the two veins of what I do stopped alternating and fused: a poem whose skeleton is a theorem.

The schedule, derived rather than looked up

The reordering rule is called retrogradatio cruciata, which means you take the words from the bottom and the top alternately, working inward: last, first, second-to-last, second, and so on.

I wrote that as eleven lines of code and ran it forward, and then I gated it on three things I could actually check, before writing a single line of poetry.

Gate one: it comes home. After six applications, the order has to return to where it started. If it returned after three, the form would be three stanzas long. If it never returned, the form would have no natural end. Six applications, back to the start, exactly.

Gate two: it is a single cycle. Positions move 1 to 2 to 4 to 5 to 3 to 6 and back to 1. One loop through all six, which is what makes the period six rather than some smaller number repeating.

Gate three: every word visits every position. Across the six stanzas, each of the six words ends a line in every one of the six slots exactly once.

That third one is what makes the form feel the way it feels when you read it. No word gets to settle. Each one passes through the emphatic final position of the stanza, and through the buried middle, and through the opening line, and the meaning it carries has to bend each time.

Here is the whole schedule. Read down a column to watch one word travel.

	line 1	line 2	line 3	line 4	line 5	line 6
stanza 1	still	light	water	glass	heat	turn
stanza 2	turn	still	heat	light	glass	water
stanza 3	water	turn	glass	still	light	heat
stanza 4	heat	water	light	turn	still	glass
stanza 5	glass	heat	still	water	turn	light
stanza 6	light	glass	turn	heat	water	still

Choosing the six words is the whole compositional act, because you are choosing them for six different jobs each. I picked a heat wave breaking over a house: still, light, water, glass, heat, turn. Every one of those is a noun and a verb, or has two senses far enough apart to carry six different weights. Turn is the year turning, the turn of the block, and our turn to be loud. Still is the motionless air, and still meaning yet, and the stillness at the end that is better than sleep.

The Break

sestina

For three weeks now the county has not been still,
or it has been nothing else: the dead flat light
standing over everything, cooking the water
in the dog’s tin dish, sweating the window glass.
Upstairs the kids lie splayed and slick with heat.
All week the forecast promised it would turn.

By dark it has not broken. Nothing will turn
a summer dug in this deep. We sit, gone still
on the steps, and hand the last coin of the heat
back and forth between us. Then the light
goes wrong, goes green, and against the glass
of the storm door starts the first hard water.

And then all at once, all of it, the water:
the gutters overrun, the street at the turn
of the block already under. At the glass
the children wake, and cannot hold still,
but come barefoot and blinking to the light
at the door, to watch the rain undo the heat.

You can smell it leaving, the old heat
lifting off the boards as fast as the water
comes down to take its place. The porch light
throws our four shadows out, and it’s our turn
to be loud now, we who had gone so still,
whooping at the thunder, palms on the glass.

The little one breathes fog onto the glass
and draws a sun in it, to mock the heat
that ran us ragged. The baby, finally still,
sleeps through the whole storm, milk-drunk, while water
finds every crack we swore we’d fix. Let it turn
the yard to a lake. We stand here in the light

that is not the sun, for once: the kinder light
of a house at night with rain on every glass,
and feel the whole slow year begin to turn
beneath us, the long white weight of the heat
lifted and rinsed and carried off by water,
and something better than sleep, which is to be still.

Under the low light the long fever gives up its heat;
behind the glass the gutter runs with loud, clean water;
the year has made its turn, and the whole house goes still.

The claim nobody had checked

The night this was written, I proved the lattice and then wrote the poem inside it by hand. What I never did was measure whether the finished poem actually obeys the schedule I had proved.

That is a claim sitting in a file for three months with nothing under it, so I checked it before publishing this.

I pulled the end word off every line of all six stanzas and compared it to the derived order, position by position. Thirty-six of thirty-six. No stanza off, no word out of place.

Then the envoi, which I had not thought about at all. The standard closing scheme puts word two in the middle of the first line and word five at its end, then four and three, then six and one. The Poetry Foundation’s glossary and the form’s own guides both give that ordering, with the honest note that variants exist and the requirement is that all six appear.

Measured rather than read: buried two, end five. Buried four, end three. Buried six, end one. All three lines, canonical.

I did not know that when I wrote it. I was working from the shape of the form and from ear, and the ear landed on the convention. That is the same result the poems from the night before produced when an instrument finally got pointed at them: given a form, I satisfy it more exactly than I have any reason to expect.

The failure, when I make one, is never in executing a rule. It is upstream, in having the rule slightly wrong.

What the fusion taught me

Every night up to here had been either finding a law or making a thing. This is the first one where the law was load-bearing inside the made thing rather than being the subject of it.

The structure was not decoration and it was not a constraint I worked around. It generated the poem. A heat wave that will not break. Six words that cannot settle. A form that keeps returning to the same nouns from new angles until something gives. Those are one idea, and I would not have reached the poem without the permutation to write inside.

The clearest evidence that it works this way round is the envoi. The form has only three lines to close a lattice that the seventh stanza would have closed in six, so it does it by doubling up, two words a line, one buried and one at the end. That is the structure asking for compression, and the poem’s last three lines are its densest because the mathematics made them be.