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

long 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 infrastructural progress

leaving it to stand,

only, as a dust collector…

But it still surprises me when I hold it,

during a play-time-break-call,

to recall a time when,

in my early childhood,

this relic might still function

if I could remember

TU-2-9888

(TU for Tulip!)

or, merely a decade before my birth,

back in the Dark Ages,

when all you needed to remember

was the operators name

to say, “Hello, Francis!” too,

before you asked her to connect you

with your buddy, Billy who lived on the other side of town,

a 4 minute bike ride, three blocks away!

I like the way my study’s lighted….

A round, brown and yellow shaded

faux-Tiffany chandelier gives the tight, cluttered 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,

the front doors swinging open in front of

Wyatt, his Butline Special blazing!

I play with it now and again,

just sitting there, paying no attention to the world,

sliding the bar-keep and the mustacheod drunks and the dead Clantons

in and out and in and out of focus

like their liquor-laden minds….

It’s one of the mandatory cobble stones on the bumpy road

to carving an added dimension to a poem.

That ancient, optical marvel stands beside

two desk lamps for which,

(Yes! Really, I do!!)

I have to purchase the bulbs

from an electric speciality store…

You know the bulbs I mean.

Those weird-shaped ones

with Edison’s fingerprints still on them.

The lamp 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 second draft of a poem.

I really do like all the angles, layers, shades, hues

and….stuff… in the room.

Yes!

I know…

All the photo-ads 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 one of 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, of course, there’s a goose-feather-pen in the mug too,

though just for show!

I haven’t written with it for years!’

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

So some concessions to modernity

are occasionally necessary,

to avoid a compromised completion of a poem.

(But only a few!)

Besides,

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

In both the clutter of my study

and in the birth of a shade of an idea

for a poem that appeals.

For life is still in the detritus we leave behind

which, once again,

amongst the junk,

we find.