Something Left Over

It must have been made and rejected, in night’s grinding gears – a knobby irregularity, a leftover of smelt and dross. This is all there is a gobbet of oven clinker, but behind it I sense cracked teeth, motes in a burnt eyeglass, the thin singed bones of fledgling flights into darkness. Here it is, a fragment long convulsed from its own incineration, an irregular rake-off, a detritus dragged across a blind stone floor. This tittle of slag once had to fit something the rough rim of an iron door perhaps behind which an old furnace still cools in faraway minds. A ferrous chip chiseled from a gulag, or a souvenir from an SS campfire meet. There is always something left after the unthinkable is thought upon, always some spicule of irregularity to explain or confound as we toss it back into the fire again.