Nothing's safe in your stars

"In & out of sleep / Even with the rise and fall." That's a Califone lyric. It's also how I feel - spent & not making much sense. I was up late (for me) taking in J_____'s remembrances of highs past as L___, with a mechanical pencil, remade the pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio & Clive Owen in the Arts section into two rather fetching drag queens. Eyeliner & pouty lips. That, I have to say, was a better choice than commenting on twenty student papers, right? There's only so much time in a day, and some of it must be budgeted toward holding court with the people you care about. I don't do it enough. Now, of course, I enter the weekend with the same amount of work.

If you buy into the theory that a sestina's endwords need to be distributed chosen according to some inherent associations between them - as in Bishop's "A Miracle Before Breakfast" wherein we get the natural words of sun & river, and the intimate words of coffee, crumb, & balcony, with the keyword or Joker being miracle (the word that drives the deployment of the others), then how about these: steam, hush (natural), lamp, wheel, and newspaper (these being tied together as manmade objects or some such), and the Joker is return? How do you fancy that? Think it'll work? How is return as a Joker-word?

What if the poem turned out to be about September 11th? This fact surprised me too. But then, it's a poem about surprise, in a way... the cycle of indifference, forgetfulness, and recurrence that has been known to attend tragedy. Which is a subject to which the sestina's obsessive setup is suited. Will G______ agree? In this case, I don't care.