Using form: Villanelle with a limp: Susan McLean, ‘Instructions for Climbing and Descending’

Good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.
When every step torments and pain is chronic,
you can’t do as you did before you fell

and sprained your ankle. As the tendons swell,
don’t make things even worse. Learn this mnemonic:
good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.

Take one step at a time. Do not rebel
or grumble that restrictions are moronic.
You can’t do as you did. Before you fell,

you bounded up the stairs like a gazelle,
but now your gait is nearly catatonic:
good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.

You’ve always known it doesn’t help to dwell
on loss. You should let go, but (how ironic!)
you can’t. Do as you did before you fell,

but try to play it safe while getting well.
The best advice is simple, yet Miltonic:
good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.
You can’t do as you did before. You fell.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I love villanelles. I like them partly because they are songlike and partly because they present interesting challenges for rhyming and for varying the repeating lines, known as repetends. I thought at first that I had set myself an impossible task with my “-onic” rhymes, but they kept surprising me and leading me in new directions. I was not planning to refer to Milton when I started, for example, but when I stumbled on “Miltonic,” it fit perfectly with the metaphors in the first line. When I started, I also didn’t realize how many ways the second repetend could be varied while still making literal sense.
“The idea behind the poem came from real-life experiences. I had sprained my right ankle once, and after I wrote this poem, I broke it twice. However, the first line, which is literally the mnemonic device offered by a physical therapist as a reminder of which foot to step on when going up or down stairs, was one I heard secondhand. My partner John was told it by his therapist when he had a painful foot. The rest of the poem is in lines with five beats (iambic pentameter), but that line has six. I decided to use it, nevertheless, because the extra beat in that repetend slows the line down, mimicking the slow gait of the person with the sprain. It also makes the line itself seem to limp.
The poem was originally published in First Things and later appeared in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Photo: “How Many Times Do You Have to Fall Before You End Up Walking” by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.