I like my study.

The way my desk chair,

(my “throne”, so my children called it)

is molded to the rounds of my back-side.

(My wife tells me I have no ass to speak of!)

And the way the straight-back makes me sit-up,

stretched, firm against warm leather

whenever I need to cease writing,

simply to cogitate .

(Usually my body knows when I need to stop way before my thinking does…)

My desk is an old roll-top with pigeon holes

and drawers of all depths and widths,

holding years of accumulated treasure,

monetarily, worthless,

but for memory sake, priceless.

There’s a candle-stick-phone with a new-fangled dial,

(new-fangled for its time).

Bell Telephone’s infrastructure progress leaving it to stand,

only, as a dust collector…

But it shocks me when I hold it during a play-time-talk

to recall a time when, in my early childhood,

this relic might still work if you might remember

TU-2-9888

(TU for Tulip!)

or, merely a decade before my birth,

all you needed to remember was the operators name

to say, “Hello, Francis!” too,

before you asked her to connect you to your buddy, Billy

who lived on the other side of town.

I like the way my study’s lighted….

A round, brown and yellow shaded

faux-Tiffany chandelier gives the tight little room

a sepia-toned dimension.

Feels like those antique stereo-optican photos

you could slide into the frame they had there for focusing

to get that 3-D feel of the scene.

Yes!

I have one of those gizmos!!

It sits on the desk top beside a dozen or so paired, cardboard

photos of old saloons that no longer exist except

in those old Western movies with the swinging doors.

I play with it now and again,

just sitting there, paying no attention to the world,

sliding the bar-keep and the mustached drunks

in and out and in and out of focus like their liquor-laden minds….

It’s a mandatory cobble stone on the bumpy road

to writing an added dimension to a poem.

Beside it stand two desk lamps for which,

(Yes! I do!!)

I have to purchase the bulbs

from an electric speciality store…

You know, those weird-shaped ones

with Edison’s fingerprints still on them.

The shades differ in thickness and hues

so the combinations of different light and color

give detail and so, enhance my perspective of the room and desk.

And also, perhaps. of a thought

in a first-time draft of a poem,

in my first-time note-book.

I really do like

all the angles, layers, shades and hues in the room…

Yes!

I know…t

The photos of a modern office show a stripped-down-desk

with a pane of thick, clear glass a-top,

empty,

but for a closed lap-top

with some anatomically correct booster seat

that feels like those old prayer benches

in Saint Phillips Episcopal!

But it’s not for me.

For I affirm the old line,

“A neat desk is a sure sign of a shallow mind”

Often, in the middle of a moment of Creation,

it’s good to play, “THE STREETS OF LORADO”

on the old Hohner-Echo, circa 1896,

I bought in an antique store in the middle of no-where, Wisconsin.

That harmonica, though I do play it, now and again,

usually, only, serves to, “…just stand and wait”,

leaning on an old pewter mug that’s filled with the cartridge pens

I use to edit second and third drafts.

And, yes, there’s a goose-feather-pen in the mug too,

though just for show!

I haven’t used it for years!’

It’s too hard to find ink and too messy to use.

So some concessions to modernity

are occasionally necessary in the interest

of a compromised completion.

(But only a few!)

Besides,

it’s in the details that truth in life is revealed.

In the clutter of my study and in the birth of an idea for a poem.

For life is still in the detritus we leave behind

and, once again,

we find.