John Hancock’s John Hancock

makes wind the way it whirls about and blows the neighboring names of other signatories away. The point of it is not the John or Jane Doe it names; the point’s the quill in motion as if still stuck and aquiver in goose skin. The trick to writing well isn’t up the sleeve. It is the sleeve that fluffs up the flourish, that blooms around the stunted stamens of the fingers and distracts us from our grasping for the sun or the uncertain scratching of the stylus.