Fin de Siècle

Out of false beginnings and some downward 

sloping motions, toward no particular 

end, not even toward transformation, 

does the hand move. What it's fashioned spins 

around itself. At its edges where details 

wait for our pleasure, the details impose themselves

on their counter, forming striated bands 

pulsing tenuously round a center 

which, were it not indiscernible, would 

glow, white-hot. That an eye was once trained 

to slow the speed of the thing’s rotation,

to parse the details from other details,

weigh them on a scale against each other 

so a whole may be forged or alluded to. 

Or that the speed of the thing’s rotation 

itself was slower, keen to be observed.

Or that the details composing the bands were not 

striated bands but images that spoke

of a "faraway," an "underneath." 

Much of what exists here will be 

discarded or forgotten. The facts are 

so apparent one feels all one can hope

to offer is an explanation.

Someone feared the surface becoming more

damp with the excess of human romance,

which raged at a boil for all history, 

indicated by destruction, war and the like, 

decided a curtailing was in order,

reduced the churn of soul to a simmer. 

The best blind gestures can only reference 

those sparse pockets of air, closest to the heat,

unable to rise or become anything

other than what they are, a few blank gaps.