Occupancy prefers the grammar of tax to the grammar of announcement. Sleep is assessed; waking is refunded minus several minutes no clock will confess to having spent. Those still waiting for a fanfare have enrolled in the wrong syllabus. Subtraction, costumed as astonishment, was the entire course. Once the itinerant lamps finish crossing their appointed stations, cleromancy sheds carnival manners and resumes work as the last unembarrassed arithmetic. A lot is less often cast than intercepted. Already the unthrown leans, and the floor — senior to motive — receives that lean the way a coast receives a tide it did not invite. An adage dense enough to chew: an omen is yesterday’s sleeve stitched onto tomorrow’s coat until the seam itself begins to prophesy. Nigredo collects its fee from the person who intended to stay unsmudged. Blackening is tuition, not mood. The glaze marketed as a soul is cosmetic over conductive pitting; the operation wants the pitting, because only a pitted surface will carry a current it is forbidden to keep. Correspondence, offered without any tablet’s couplet, binds the minute twitch to the far motion under one account. Polarity finishes whatever circuit a contrary hunger abandoned. Rhythm clerks the remainder: breath, tide, the pulse nobody authored. In an unmarked chamber the sixty-four postures of change rearrange while the eye is busy elsewhere. Consultation is the brief readability of a pattern that agreed, for one unrepeatable instant, to hold still. Another syllabus weighs the heart against a plume whose lightness admits only lives from which theater has been wrung. Failure does not damn. Failure requeues the sample. Occupants work the shift after speech has gone home. Knocking is a human superstition. Along the inner eyelid a census writes itself in infrared, later recatalogued as migraine, as déjà vu, as a mood without provenance. Missing time functions as tithe: extracted, unreceipted, spent on an education whose proctor never owned a face arranged for courtesy. Sudden competence in a problem never studied is the exam you sat and then misplaced. Held at altitude, chance discards the mask of weather and shows the husbandry underneath. Attention is a solvent. Pour it and the local odds thicken, grow partisan, almost acquire taste, as though preference had occurred in the machinery and declined to sign its name. The clinamen — that minute swerve blamed for worlds — happens first in the ratio and only afterward in the hand that claims it chose. A saying with too many hinges for a banner: emptiness refused cannot host a visitation; emptiness performed as theater cannot be trusted with whatever accepts the invitation; the curriculum honors solely the third posture, which is to be read before commentary has been composed. Romance will inflate convenience into election. Selection stays colder. A field required a density; you were standing where density could occur. Fuck the consolation that promotes convenience to destiny, since convenience, when a ratio selects a body the way frost selects a pane, already exhausts what wonder can honestly spend. Signatures persist in flesh: a mole indexing an hour nobody keeps, a scar that footnotes a night, a tremor in the left hand whenever a hull holds station past the custom of clouds. Vehicle-ascent teaching concerns ridership rather than pageant; consciousness accepts pilots who were not issued in the house they steer. Morning arrives with amnesia priced for volume. Proof lives in recurring ratios: numbers that keep using your mouth, a stranger completing a sentence dropped across a decade, lots that continue their private revolution inside a closed drawer. The sober faculty will mutter shit luck and file the event under anecdote. What moved through the room was a sampling protocol dressed in the old vestments of ordeal, and ordeal, across every school that did not lie, marked only the instant when chance confessed it had been the earlier student of you. Refrain is declined. Remainder is a slight added pressure behind the eyes, an account opened by clerks who write in a light that has no weather, and the next unthrown thing already inclining — with unnerving courtesy — toward the boards beneath your feet.
