THE LIVES OF OBJECTS

I share my home with carnival mirrors and tarnished silver, amulets in the shape of abacuses and African masks, dolls with molting hair and cracks around the cheeks where too many times they had been kissed by little girls, curios painted creamy white to cover half-finished portraits of ladies named Opal and Francesca in their pearls now shrunk to the size of babies’ teeth, a cold clair de lune rounding the blackened sylvan-scape on the far wall, moose heads with graying nostrils and sentient marble eyes that fix me with disdain, a flock of dead pocket watches sunk into a drawer like chandeliers in Triton’s ballroom, stacks of magazines and books long out of print which still hold a measure of interest for the transient, the lover, those who exist outside of time.