Nicer ways of looking at machines

This is pleasanter, behind the fastened ropes—behind them so that we’re among the way they work—and what they lift is anyone’s best guess, we can’t see that part.

Steam obscures the parts that make the steam, obscures the rope, a linen white wagon of fine dirt that swells you healthy. The central wheel is less central.

Shuddering is necessary if the wood is what shudders. If the wood’s like been in ocean water, if the wood’s well traveled. Can’t you see it all? All of it, that I regret, and I regret a lot.

We all sit at the same time, first at separate tables in a large room, then in a circle, then on the floor, talking and not talking.

When I have something to say I say that I am scared of this place I have just remembered, that I will always remember it now, and never see it again. I say this to see my voice in the steam and the central wheel.

The last part’s easy—you are hoping that the gears will float and the machine will make a machine to make what it does for the first time, in the first place.

An epilogue: bombards you like a central wheel, teal colored and the color of that room, the color of different suns.