THAT AFTERNOON Dr. Charmin introduced the villanelle, another something French, she said, and powerful, giving Sarah a silencing look. The board had been chalked with what seemed like Greek to me—beats and syllables, paired rhymes and repetitions, the word tercet five times, and then the word quatrain. A few rows ahead of me and over, Theo was taking notes, his shoulders hunched and his back to me, but I knew I couldn’t study him, because Margie was studying me. “Welcome back, Elisa,” I heard Dr. Charmin saying, as if she’d just noticed I was there. “It’s nice to see you looking well.” You couldn’t take a teacher’s word for something like that: Forty-eight eyes whisked toward me and stared. Theo winked.
We were all divided then into six sets of four and given copies of a poem. “You learn villanelles by listening to villanelles,” Dr. Charmin began again, as now she walked up and down the aisles, distributing the day’s work. “What we’re reading today is Elizabeth Bishop’s masterpiece ‘One Art.’ If you never read another villanelle in your life, then at least you will have this one swimming in your blood. Don’t try to do the poem’s mathematics just yet. Just read aloud when I tell you to, and listen for the patterns.
“This group here,” Dr. Charmin pointed. “Take the first tercet. And so on”—she gestured again—“as it goes.”
“Like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ for adults,” someone mumbled, though nobody, in the post-Sarah administration, even dared to laugh.
“‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master;’” the designated group began, not in sync at first, then finding its stride:
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
“Second tercet?” Dr. Charmin said, raising her hand like a maestro, and commanding from Sarah, Theo, Mitchell, and only-ever-gives-dumb-answers Lurch a choral-quality response:
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then the third tercet was brought to full voice and released, and then the fourth, and finally the fifth, which was my own, which I read with Candy, Daniel, and Hart, who sit in the back of the room hoping they’ll never be noticed and made like background vocals to my solo act:
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
“The quatrain,” Dr. Chamin said, and it was read, then there was silence. “It’s fierce, isn’t it?” she suggested. “Fierce, and also quite a surprise. You have to have something to say when you write, and Bishop says it all. What’s more, she does it within the strictures of a very particular form. So what, in the end, is a villanelle?”
“Tercets and quatrains,” Matt said.
“Five of the first, one of the latter.” Dr. Charmin nodded. “But beyond all that, what’s the pattern? Look at the poem. Which lines repeat? How are they changed, with the repeating?”
“Master and disaster,” Theo said, “are the big words.”
“And not just the words themselves—right, Theo?—but also the lines that they’re attached to.”
“Right.”
“Somebody tell me how Elizabeth Bishop has taken chances.”
“The last line,” I said, when nobody else would, “looks like a note to self.”
“What else?”
“It isn’t a perfect one-hundred-percent copy of the lines it’s supposed to be patterned off of.”
“Which means?”
“That the meaning was fiercer than the form right there? Or that maybe you show fierceness by breaking form?”
“Interesting perspective, Elisa. Thank you.”
“Are we going to have to write villanelles?” It was Margie, wanting to know.
“Of course we are. This is Honors English.”
“But it looks so hard,” said Candy. Sarah sighed really loudly but said nothing.
“I’m giving you the rest of the class,” Dr. Charmin said, “to get started. Ask me questions, if you have them.”
There was the sound, then, of paper being torn from notebooks, of feet shuffling out, chairs being pushed back, elbows hitting desks. I stole a look at Theo, pushing the blank page around before him. Then I saw Margie watching me watch Theo. She made a face and cracked her gum.