a sestina

I actually kind of dreaded writing this for my creative writing class, but I ended up having a ton of fun with it. It's my first sestina and probably the longest poem I've ever written.

Saturday Morning Visitations

The rain is dashing down slowly, in a delirious run
down the cracked window, wood framing the delicious
glass. It glides down the slick surfaces, making new and continuous mountains
and rivers in front of her eyes. She sits and imagines ghosts
that must live in those destroyed paths
and thinks about past love and a familiar stranger.

She turns away from the window, choosing to ignore her stranger and stranger
thoughts tracing down her window. She gets in her car to make a run
to the nearby grocery store. She crosses the dirt paths
outside, muddy with rain. She wants to buy strawberries, how delicious
they will taste on this gloomy summer day! Her childish excitement ghosts
over her filmy windows, until it seems like mere strawberries can move the mountains

of her past. But her happiness is quickly dashed when she finds the usual mountains
of green strawberry baskets gone and replaced by things stranger
than she has ever seen. There are spiky fruits instead of her strawberries, now merely ghosts
of better grocery experiences. The tears come and because she is afraid her eyeliner will run,
she rushes out of the store and into her car, enjoying the delicious
cold blast from the air conditioner. She wipes her makeup before it can make paths

down her flushed cheeks when she sees him across the street, across the paths
of painful recognition. He doesn’t see her, and she is glad because mountains
have moved into her heart. Dark and cold they are, stealing the delicious
warmth of recovery that has made a fragile entrance in her heart, turning him into a stranger
not long ago. She sits in her car, thinking of how she would like to run
in front of him and declare her presence. But she must remind herself that he is just one of many ghosts

now. If she ran towards him with open arms, she would certainly fall because his arms, ghosts
as they are, are made of nothing but memories. Their past is merely an accident, paths
now weighted down with prickly briars and heavy, old perfume. She wants to run
her fingers through her hair, but feels like her heart, heavy with those mountains,
may have just lost the strength to do that. She drives home through unfamiliar roads, until the stranger
and stranger landscape tells her she is in an unknown town. To her, this is a delicious

discovery, because maybe here, she will relearn the feeling of detached remembrance. Now, the delicious
sun is peeking out and the rain is gone, those droplets quickly becoming ghosts
on her windshields. She thinks, he must become a stranger, stranger
than the prickly fruits she saw in the grocery store, and much more inaccessible. If their paths
crossed again, well then, her heart will not move. She will be like mountains.
Having settled this, she gets into her car and begins to run

the engine, humming strange and stranger songs as she retakes paths
into her hometown. On her way back, she spies and purchases some delicious strawberries, no longer ghosts
of rainy grocery trips. With her strawberries, there is no way even mountains can destroy the way her heart will now run.