Bierds - Rogets illusion

Before the beak of a tiny pipette dipped through a glisten of DNA and ewe quickened to ewe with exactly the simulacrum forty thousand years had worked toward, before Muybridges horses cantered and a ratchet-and-pawl-cast waltzing couple shuffled along a phasmatrope, before dime-size engines sparked in the torsos of toddler dolls and little bellows let them sing and the Unassisted Walking One Miss Autoperipatetikosstepped in her caterpillar gait across the New Worlds wide-plank floor, before motion moved the figures, and torsion moved the motionor steam, or sand, or candle flamebefore magnets and taut springs nudged Gustav the Climbing Miller up his mills retaining wall (and gravity retrieved him), before image, like sound, stroked through an outreach of crests and troughs, and corresponding apertures caught patterns in the waves, caught, like eels beneath ancestral ponds, radiance in the energy, before lamposcope and zograscope, fantascope and panorama, before lanterns re-cast human hands, or a dye-drop of beetle first fluttered across a flicker book of papyrus leaves, someone sketched a creature along the contours of a cave, its stippled, monochromatic shape tracing the vaults and hollows, shivers of flank and shoulder already drawing absence nearer, as torchlight set the motion and shadow set the rest.