The covered bridge nears completion,
Built from the center of the roof out.
Any amateur knows you begin
Construction with the frame, seeking for
Flat edges, sorting colors as you go.
I was always better at the bright work.
I leave the ends suspended as quick work
Slows. It can wait for completion.
So obediently back to the frame I go.
I eye pieces of sky. It's not long before
In distraction I begin to pick blues out,
Pawing through the box eager to begin.
When did jigsaws and the pandemic begin
To take on gray tones as I work?
My right eye developed a fog long before
I took on this frame that defies completion.
Better to move on to orange foliage out
Behind the bridge. With nowhere else to go
On a rainy day, as we shelter in place, I go
About making the broken whole. I begin
To accept how dreary this project is without
Corrected vision. For days, I work
Instead to bring this sestina to completion.
I pull back the cover I find useful for
Protecting the puzzle and fold it, for
For the time being, out of sight. I go
From sky to high contrast, seek completion
Down the center. Where the river begins
To cascade it foams white, works
Its way between rock and weed out
To a black pool along the bottom. Out
Of the jumble fingers seek for
One piece here and there to work
Into one empty spot where it will go
Easily. So many empty spaces, I begin
To put off attempts at completion.
Piece work a blur, brown rock shines out
Copper bright on completion, alchemy for
Wherever I go, the patience to again begin.
Published in: Cirque #24, vol. 12:2, June 2022
Some people began to practice new or rediscovered hobbies to get them through the pandemic. One of mine was piecing back together a beautiful scene that had been cut up with a jigsaw. It panders to my love of color and texture. As a kid I would design clothing using a paper model with a strong resemblance to Cher; I would design home interiors using graph paper and cutouts from Sears Roebuck and J. C. Penneys catalogs. During my college years, I joined in the family tradition of quilting. Better yet: Jigsaw puzzles arrive in a box, no messy cutting, pasting, or stitching.
Puzzles also appeal to my sense of a place for everything and everything in its place. I find satisfaction in putting things in the correct place. Is it a stamp of the military life I grew up with? Or the result of my mother’s nagging? This is something I can control.
It counts as the “hobby” that AARP declares important to a healthy lifestyle in old age. Let’s face it, writing poetry is not a hobby for me. You could consider it my nervous twitch under stress, my avocation, my obsession, my legacy. Sometimes it is fun but that’s not my primary reason for claiming to be a poet. On consideration, putting jigsaw puzzles together isn’t just a hobby either. It may be the closest I ever get to a sense of tikkun olam, repairing the world.
I don’t write a poem, let alone a sestina, every time I finish a jigsaw puzzle. (I usually take a couple of photographs and leave it at that.) But Covered Bridge by White Mountain was my first. We were living in a high rise in downtown Portland, a cramped little space with too much furniture and so many books. David and I were locked down, getting out only to take the dog for a walk. When I worked on the puzzle, I pictured myself out-of-doors, hovering in shade under the bridge and above the narrow rapids.
The macular traction syndrome, which affected my right eye and eventually led to surgery, made reading difficult. (Reading had always been my great escape from trying situations.) Matching smaller, less intense patches of color got harder. With my eyes fatigued by books and screens, the tactile part the puzzle allowed me to feel how pieces would snap into place.
If you see a poetic form as a puzzle- this jigsaw, this picture, and the process I developed for completing it begged to be a sestina. With the six words at the end of the lines of the first stanza set, I moved between the puzzle, where each piece fit in only one place, and the poem, where the possibilities seemed limitless.
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