He worked on the far edge of sanity: his precarious balance, somehow miraculously maintained, was what gave his work such an edge.

Her characters are sleazy and murky, holding a precarious balance between tragedy and farce.

Given this precarious balance of wet and dry conditions, even a slight shift in the distribution of annual precipitation can have serious consequences.

Although the land gives them enough to live on, the precarious balance has been upset by a long drought.

In this context, axial refers to the invisible axis that comes into focus at the moment of precarious balance.