Turns, all day, and arrives nowhere. The barber pole's stripes climb in one direction only, a diagonal band engineered to read as endless upward motion rather than the spiral it actually traces around a fixed cylinder. Four rotations a minute is the count on three different blocks, across three different decades of hardware, an oddly consistent number, as if the colors had agreed on a pace.
The finials, domed top and bottom, are the closest thing a shopfront offers to ceremony. The stripes themselves are a memory of bloodletting, red for blood and white for the bandage, a trade the pole has gone on advertising for two centuries after the barbers gave it up. Under them a motor hums at a pitch just below conversation, audible only when the shop itself goes quiet, which is rare. The wall bracket takes the real weight: paint beneath it wears thin in a pattern the rest of the housing never shows, decades of holding something that insists on turning against gravity's better judgment. Cast housings from the 1950s still hold motors installed last year; a shop replaces the guts twice before the shell needs anything. Bulb counts run three to a stripe, or five; shops split close to evenly on the choice. The pole stops wherever the switch catches it, mid stripe, and stays that way until the shop reopens and sets it turning again.