He pulls his
wooden cart through the alleys of a city.
He is old and gray, and yet his arms are
long and limber,
rotating like bicycle pedals as he gleans
treasure
from lives cast off helter-skelter on backwater
stone:
a pair of shoes, a crooked table, pulleys
and chain,
a self-portrait by an artist who had
little self-esteem.
There is no such thing as junk to this
connoisseur of nuts and bolts,
of chicken wire or wooden spindles that
clattered in looms
and machines that hummed and turned into
inventors’ dreams,
bric-a-brac becoming threads that weave the
tapestry of a king
on a castle wall or a hovel where the embroidered
feathers
of a peacock may spread wide in diversity
and sing.
The man brings the day’s bounty to a
barn at the edge of town.
Come sundown, the people of the city will,
like mice
running in the dark, pick clean this multiplicative
museum
in order to add to their own collections
of the world reborn:
a toy, a milking stool, or a tattered virgin’s
gown.
Such are the acts of God as he collects
chapter and verse
when piecing together star stuff into
nickel-iron orbs,
when every now and then he tidies up, or
invents, a universe.
~William Hammett
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