Conservator’s Statement

Things, stuff, keepsakes, doodads; junk,
curios, and conversation pieces; souvenirs,
trinkets, paraphernalia, oddball collectibles.
Items ineffably indisposable, whatnots
and weird effects, worthless and invaluable.
Memorabilia, mementos, weird magnets
and rigamarole, matchbooks and bones,
shed antlers, the hoof of an elk hollowed out
by years of a rivers flow, fundamentally useless
freight to be foisted upon one’s heirs someday.
Little box made of dovetailed wood, someone’s
lost fob of keys inside. Ticket stubs and a stob
of tree limb in the shape of a broken heart.
A bowl of letharia vulpina, wolf lichen,
growing ever more luminously chartreuse
as it dries. The collar bone of a hare,
for literary reasons. Seasonal wrack,
elephantine maple leaf forgotten and flattened
in a book of photographs of old-time loggers.
Clutch of nine whistles whistled once.
Conundra, paradoxical pieces of other pieces
of sanctified crap, most figurative,
but for a pair of owl pellets sealed in spray lacquer
lest they disintegrate, from one, the skull
of a mouse grinning a half-smile into the room.
Also an actual coprolite, fossilized literal shit.
Unbeloved treasure, doubloons of detritus,
memorial markers, evidence of passage
and testimonials of a seeing one would wish
to be deeper, imaginative chits and vouchers,
assurances that one was, that one had been,
that one had walked through the world
perceiving heaven. The Champion sparkplug
ensheathed in amalgamate stone and sand,
little engine of remembering, bric-a-brac
gimcrackery, doohickey amulets, frou-frou
found and undocumented, haphazardly curated
and placed in places where each might be,
for the finder or a passerby, acknowledged,
in bewilderment or amazement or a rush of recall,
as what was, and so acknowledged, still is.