Ode to a Compass

I can still recall my first encounter with a compass in the second grade. It was shiny & dangerous, a headless ballerina with one wooden leg. How odd, I thought, that we should entrust the drawing of circles to something so asymmetrical. And what to do about that pinhole at the center of the paper? It seemed flawed & unnecessary, like a seed for a stone. I wanted a way to make a circle from without, like shaping a pot on a wheel. I had seen hawks spiral around an updraft with nothing more than a slight adjustment to the wingtips. Shouldn’t we who are descended from the trees be able to free-hand perfect circles, simply by letting the mind go blank as a target? The compass is a crutch. Restore its missing leg so it can return to its first life as a gnomon: stationary, circled by the sun.