Day 1: Seize the Carp (sestina)

The prompt for our first poem on the National Poetry Writer's Month is a "carpe diem" poem. This isn't really a poem in that vein, but I've always wanted to use this tonally inappropriate title.

Seize the Carp

There is so much granite

here that they are murdering the elders

just to produce tombstones.

The mason wants to buy land

build from the materials there;

to write my name and birth date on the door.

The taste of aluminum, the angry door.

Taxes may only be submitted in granite.

The scab-eater can come but the mason stays there,

where the best prisons are made of elders,

and the crows circle the tower twice before they land.

The big gray church, a big gray tombstone.

So what if this watery, singing tombstone

of mine has one hand on the door;

plans and labeled boxes and wilder land,

leaving the mason alone with his granite

bicycle, the broken mop, the branches of the elder

scraping against the walls, there,

by the headboard, the damned bells there,

disrespecting late sleepers and the tombstones.

Surrendering a crop of holidays to the elders

neglecting the statuary, worshiping the door.

Even the constellations were built with granite,

the stories we tell, unearthed from the land.

The bells circle the crows, the cow eats the land.

Felines watch from windows there

on the second floor, as the statues, the granite,

the churches, the stars, the tombstones

rub their shadows as far as they can reach. Doors

are fragile as the hymen, the elders

say we can only pass through them once. The elders

have retired their chisels, shovels; the land

is not even tired. It will shower you with stars and doors

statues, tandem bicycles, no twin to marble but there,

working his plough between the tombstones,

the mason composes oxen machines from the granite.

Poor mason, with your tools of unearthing; there there,

a purse of stone coin, a sin of tombstones,

Set the table for one, a feast of granite.