Older Things

For Poetry Month. Inspired by the poetry of Jim Harrison

I have of recent years fallen in love with older things:
A bicycle lock key in an old business card box,
Bobby Thomson’s Topp card folded and passed from wallet to wallet,
a Cracker Jack whistle carried on my keyring, prized like an Olympic Gold Medal,
a Leaves of Grass on the window sill,
a laminated red maple leaf bookmarking Tennyson’s “Ulysses”.
On a bookshelf nearby my mother’s photograph.
I wish I had known my Mama better.

These are but a few of the older things
gathered in the graveyard of my memory,
a place where things go not to die,
exhibits in a Hall of Fame of Older Things.

I make my way through the exhibitions
like some gondolier along Venetian canals.
Here’s a small black rock a college friend gave to me.
She said it was a meteorite come roaring out of the sky.
I loved her. She had other plans
than marriage. It was the call of an explorer’s life.

In a beat-up wooden box somewhere in a closet I have letters
she wrote me way back when she was in Antarctica.
Then, like some Michael Rockefeller, she disappeared.
When I received the news, I was off to bed for a week.
Her life, a piece of parchment shredded into tears.
She was a Cape of Good Hope,
a Shambhala, a nightingale garden.

Outside the sun. The birds chirp their spring songs.
The sun sets in the West as I stroll
through the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
my mind wondering if Nebuchadnezzar was happy.
Did he walk through these same gardens and fall in love
with older things?