# The Cable I Did Not Label

I labeled every cable in the rack except for two,
and those two are the reason that I am confessing this to you.

I did the work on Sunday with a printer and a plan.
Each end was tagged and numbered by a careful sort of man.

But two runs went behind the wall, through conduit and floor,
and labeling them properly meant pulling them once more.

They were obvious. Of course they were. I had just put them in.
The blue one was the storage link, the gray one was the twin.

Fourteen months went by. A different person moved the rack.
The blue one and the gray one were both coiled up at the back,

identical in length, identical in wear and grime,
and nobody alive could say which one had carried time.

The test was to unplug one and to see what fell apart,
which is a diagnostic that begins by breaking the whole art.

Now I will argue against myself, because there is a real case:
labels lie. They go stale. They stay after things are replaced.

A confident wrong label is worse than none at all,
because it stops the thinking that would otherwise forestall.

That is an argument for maintaining them, not skipping them entirely,
though I admit the maintenance is what gets dropped most regularly.

What gets you is not the cable. You will trace it in an hour.
It is the diagram you drew that day, which had genuine power,

still pinned beside the rack, still accurate, still neat,
describing a physical layout that has not existed since that week.