The Fiction of the Outline

Just been to London: seen the keen intrepid
blueprint of a wide two-thousand-year-old mind –
drawn in undermining layered traceries like
capillaries, thinness upon thinness to evoke

the fiction of a shadowed thickness: delicacy
sifted into delicacy – tricked into the look
of imperturbability: a Parliament of Empire:
gothic dream of Ozymandias – the stage set

for a kingdom built of finely executed excess:
tiny etches sketching over, under, into, out of
and back through itself as if they were the woven
worries of the human soul. I have seen

the fiction of the outline which purports
to make it whole – and does. Whatever isn’t,
is; whatever wasn’t, was. Its complicated
dreaming makes it real. That’s its deal.


 
 
 
 
.