It's Still Life

This week’s Six Sentence Story (SSS), which calls for 6 sentences including the word game, is written in a poetic form called a Cadralor. It’s a poem of 5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem (in this case prose) of fewer than 10 lines, and optionally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to Cadralor: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a poem that subliminally answers the question: “For what do you yearn?” Unfortunately, I can’t find a photo of Hector, although I’m sure there are plenty in photo books in the loft. This image is AI, created using Midjourney, as are most images found on this site.

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Not Forever but Something Still

I.
For a few fine years, we lived in an old house next to an open grassy field, and come late winter that field was bouncing with lambs – for five years we lived there, not forever, but something still, and there was a long wooden bench painted celery-green by the front door where I drank coffee in the morning, black tea in the afternoon, and chamomile in the evening — and we made a game of counting lambs with the children.

II.
And at the edge of my thoughts, always the sea chewing away at the chalk cliffs that occasionally fell into disintegrating chaos, and old oaks casting shadows that thrust like pornography against the windows, but best of all I’d take my dog for walks … a big Lab, black, named Hector, who moved like a long shadow cast by antiquity. Hector is buried under a pear tree, he was always burying something; he once buried my alarm clock; Hector was game for anything.

III.
While we lived in that house my friend Bella’s dementia became apparent, so I visited her every day, took her laundry home with me, brought her food and sat with her to be sure she remembered to eat it … she wanted fried potatoes, two sausages and a poached egg every day; three times a day, and she kept a photo of me by her chair so she’d remember my face – we played a game … she’d give me a new name every day.

IV.
First Hector died, and then Bella died the following month, although we didn’t bury Bella with Hector, even though she probably would’ve loved that, and at the end, Bella thought Hector was a cow, and she’d ask if I’d be kind enough to bring the cows across the stream, bring them home for milking, although the last time a cow crossed that stream was in 1946, but Bella had precise memories of 1946, and 1956, not sure about 1976 though.

V.
I lit a candle at the church that Bella attended every Sunday — until she couldn’t, and I admit being seduced by the candlelight, chanting and incense, the long black robes … but the trappings were insufficient to turn my path, and I’ll tell you something else: the thing about lambs is everyone thinks they’re game at Easter, and that field, once a blur of fleece slowly returned to nothing but grassy green, but it was a fine few years that I lived there, not forever, but something still.

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Written for SSS “game” Poem form: cadralor. Sentence count: I.1/II.2/III.1/IV.1/V.1 . Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2024.