Picking at the iron flakes, you said what you feared most 
was haze, that orbital heat dragging back and forth in the sky, 
condensing into hot chandeliers stuck bright to the metallic 
atmosphere. This does not make sense, I say. But what do I know 
of aggregates and origins? Or geological time scales whipping 
creatures along into death, into love, into vital 
textures and tribes of phylum? This is not what I know. 
Once, you showed me a radiolarian, a little protozoic net of 
curves (and there are so many curves in Art: Gothic, Nouveau, 
Hogarth, and Serpentine). I said they looked like they suffered 
whiplash underwater, crouching into inky spheres. I said to look at 
balconies and think Rococo. There are many soils and they 
are thickening, even now. But you hate to see mass so covalent, 
preferring burnt and uncertain matter, open roots and elder veins, 
pinning wing pieces like constellations distilling across a blank wall.