The last few days I've been feeling like crap — I caught a bad cold or something at West Chester so I haven't been to work, and I cut the top of my left index finger sharpening a knife so I can't play mandolin and I haven't done dishes — but I have been unusually good (for me) in one way: I sent off two batches of poems.
I know it's Summer Solstice today, but looking at and revising "finished" poems for submission while that sink stared at me reminded me of this poem, my only villanelle. I'd just begun to be interested in form and meter when I made it, and it's a mess of awkward line breaks and four and five beat lines using no particular foot. And what better day to fix it up than a first day of summer when I'm only mile from a beach and can't go there?
Winter Villanelle
The dishes are dirty and winter has come—
Neither will kill me, I hope, but I swear
That I'd rather be at the beach drinking rum.
There the sun is warm; here my nose is numb
And I'm at the sink suffering mal de mer—
The dishes are dirty and winter has come.
In the heatless kitchen I pick at some crumb
In my Playtex gloves and long underwear,
Longing to be at the beach drinking rum—
Oh, then I'd be lost in Elysium,
Far from that moldy Camembert—
But dishes are dirty and winter has come.
The suds, like the snow, seem pure and fool some,
But not people me, with our savoir faire—
We'd rather be at the beach drinking rum,
For snow becomes slush and suds turn to scum
And there's nothing but freezing and sneezing where
And there's nothing but misery anywhere where
The dishes are dirty and winter has come—
God! let me be at the beach drinking rum!
Still ain't right (that's a very loose triple-meter tetrameter), but it may be fit for company now.
Update: Line 17 edited 6 22 2005
3:30:03 PM 
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