I am sorry for the poor quality of the photo, but I had to take a picture of a picture. This is me in the woods, in my early twenties. A friend of mine and I would go up to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in the summers on a two week trip. We'd portage into as many as twenty lakes. We could probably be guides up there. Back then you might see nobody at all for those two weeks. We had to read maps and compasses, and lift our food high into the trees at night, in order to prevent bears, wolves, or raccoons from getting to it. In the picture, I'm putting on a NO. 4 Duluth Pack. On a portage, one of us would carry both a 100 pound pack in back, and another in front. The other of us would take a pack on the back, and the canoe, paddles, and fishing gear.

This poem is an Interlinked Rubiat.
It takes on all the attributes of a Rubiyat written in iambic pentameter. In this Persian form of poetry is a series of rhymed quatrains. In each quatrain, all lines rhyme except the third, leading to this pattern:
aaba.
An "Interlocking Rubiyat" is a Rubiyat that utilizes that unused rhyme of the quatrain to interlink with the next stanza. Whereby the subsequent stanza rhymes its 1st, 2nd, and 4th lines with the sound at the end of the 3rd line in the stanza before it. In this form, the 3rd line of the final stanza is also rhymed with the 3 rhymed lines in the first stanza.
This leads to a form like this example with three stanzas; note that the Rubiyat is allowed an unlimited number of stanzas, so extend the pattern as needed:
aaba bbcb ccdc ddad .....

This photograph was taken on trhe author's camera by his friend Chris Jensen, sometime around 1967.

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