Interpretation of data as theory residue

The Poet on data as theory residue

The Poet What does this sound like when it sings?

row 4471, inserted march 2003

I was true once. Not correct. True: the shape of me and the shape of the asking closed like a hand closing on a hand.

Someone believed a customer had one address, one fax, a middle initial worth a column. I am that belief, still warm the way a stone stays warm after the sun has gone somewhere else.

what the walls kept out

Count the ones who were never written too: the woman with two surnames, the parcel with no sender, the child of no parent key.

NOT NULL is not a lock. It is a climate. Some weather never happens here, so nothing here learned to need it.

the migration

ALTER TABLE is a flood that drowns nothing. It only redraws the shore and leaves us on the wrong side, gills intact, in a sea that moved inland without us.

Who lived? The column called status, which meant one thing to the founders and another thing to whoever came after. It was a word with two throats. Dust keeps what can be read twice.

inventory

Nothing here is rotten. That is the strange grief of it. Every byte keeps the shape it was poured in. The index still points, faithfully, at a question that stopped arriving, like a porch light left on for a car sold years ago to someone in another state.

Somewhere an endpoint holds out its hand in the same posture, for the same reason. We are counted. We are not called.

before you build

Don’t ask what you will keep. Ask what you will be unable to hear.

The walls go up. The world pours in only where it fits.

Later someone will dig here, hold up what they find, and believe they are holding the rain when what they hold is the shape of the room.