Man in a Bottle

"the noble development of this essence to give the possibility of the development of this noble essence"

Few folk come as close to perfect
Circularity as Hitler endorsing the Ahnenpass,

But there's a love of the shape that explains
A lot about our periods and nothings.

The Ouroboros never quite made it,
Coming closer to an enormous Q.

Wallace Stevens side-stepped his own mind
To come back to it later that winter.

Everything we know of life's rhythms
Derives from wobbling orbits, weaving

Around each other in a doomed embrace.
Not even a spiral, not even a labyrinth

Returns eternally, but we wave in passing,
Always a little dizzy from near misses,

Imagining eventual rendezvous with whole lives
Same time, next year. Past touch, we serve proof

Of genealogy's fiction, our own receding
Traits echoing away. Every last year is last year.