These Things We Hold

Let me crawl into
This sacred place
Of marble things
And faded lace
Let me feel the roundness
In my hand
Of cool glass beads
And endless sands.

My open palm is a wrinkle in time. My tipsy tines of tepid wine. I craft and clutch and love and kiss. A velvet bag of colored wishes.

 The silver circle
A slivered moon
But sunned and warm
But light and cool.
A faded picture
A tatty book
A palimpsest of newer scriptures

Tintinnabulation of talismans. Erstwhile I wear what I once hid. I am a being of many thoughts. I am a bag of marbles. I am marbles lost.

 I am found
I am a moiety
A lilting mondegreen
Whispers to me
We are in the offing
Of an infinite life
Let us sit together
And hold it tight.

 

I was always the type of person who found great comfort in symbolic things, especially as a child. I had a wooden puzzle box that my father brought back from one of his trips to Romania that I kept a lot of my things in – an orange ribbon, a key-chain from a family friend who was in the army, a smattering of pieces of colored glass. I liked having special sticks that were smooth and limber and special rocks that were round and weighty. I always wished from a magic thing that I keep all my things in and they would never get lost.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve slowly put less value on things, but I think there will always be a few items that hold special significance. Items that have become symbols of myself and my identity. This is a poem about those things.

-Merav