Don't cry over spilt milk

Leo asked us to write a sestina each for next week's practical criticism class. A sestina has very specific rules on form, consisting of 6 stanzas of 6 lines with a three line stanza at the end, and a strange permutation of end words which change their positions based on a set order. Notoriously hard to write, and always having the tension of form and freedom, artifice and sincerity within them, I don't know how I shall manage to produce one that is even a smidge as good as the one I read on Friday:

Sestina -Ian Patterson

Autumn as chill as rising water laps
and files us away under former stuff
thinly disguised and thrown up on a screen;
one turn of the key lifts a brass tumbler -
another disaster probably averted, just,
while the cadence drifts in dark and old.

Voices of authority are burning an old
car on the cobbles, hands on their laps,
as if there was a life where just
men slept and didn't strut their stuff
on stage. I reach out for the tumbler
and pour half a pint behind the screen.

The whole body is in pieces. Screen
memories are not always as sharp as old
noir phenomena. The child is like a tumbler
doing back-flips out of mothers' laps
into all that dark sexual stuff
permanently hurt that nothing is just.

I'm telling you this just
because I dream of watching you behind a screen
taking your clothes off for me: the stuff
of dreams, of course. Tell me the old, old
story, real and forgetful. Time simply laps
us up, like milk from a broken tumbler.

A silent figure on the stage, the tumbler
stands, leaps and twists. He's just
a figure of speech that won't collapse
like the march of time and the silver screen;
like Max Wall finally revealing he was old
and then tarting again in that Beckett stuff,

I'd like to take my sense of the real and stuff
it. There's a kind of pigeon called a tumbler
that turns over backwards as it flies, old
and having fun; sometimes I think that's just
what I want to do, but I can't cut or screen
out the lucid drift of memory that laps

my brittle attention just off screen
away from the comfortable laps and the velvety stuff
I spilled a tumbler of milk over before I was old.