I miss you when I’m gone from you, Machine, writing glass.  I have spent days feeling for what’s missing in writing on paper, though verily it supplies far more than it misses.  I feel for it and there is nothing, a small balloon of nothing, and I skim my fingers lightly along the inside of it.  I find what’s missing…   Massshhhhhine, the paper doesn’t show me Budapest.

I have the lenses!  Some of them anyway.  Two magnifying glasses, the kind with the band of metal and the long slim bolt that ties its end together to the heavy brass handle with the pleasantly biting, criss-cross grip texture.  That’s not nearly all.  There was a bin of loose 3” magnifying lenses caked in yellowish mud – yes, I can’t wait to imagine how that happened.  Perhaps left in a barn for 50 years, right by the door?  I scratched away a splop of camel colored mud, or perhaps it was something far worse, radioactive, or scatological.  It wiped clean away and the lenses were not scratched, so I bought 8 of them.  They are heavy and lay in the hand like cool, smooth oysters.  How will I rig them?  I will solve it at the bench.  I will ask glass people.  I bought quite a few miniscule clear acrylic lenses, sized like watch batteries. Tomorrow I will be waving them in front of the light, near and far, to find out what happens.   I could not resist getting a spectrum disk, even though to throw rainbows is not on order.  It’s a nimbus!  For the wait-till-you-see! I got a manila envelope of 10 colored light gels.  When I spotted them on the bottom shelf, underneath the rows of small bins of all manner of lenses, I heard the voice of God from over the florescent lights, “Who loves you, Baby?”

I got two jeweler’s loops for $4 each, three random projector lenses, torn from fossilized overhead projector arms, and a flexible magnifying sheet, book-sized, for the hard of seeing.  I should have gotten neutralizing lenses, but I passed them up for their drab depiction of the world.

There will be brazing, for hinges. rockety-rock, with the whirling nimbus and the magnified gaze.  And that, too, will be whisked away by thieving angels who sew magic into it, and return it, while I am sleeping.