for Heather and Bruce
Outside, the barber pole, a swirl
of symbolic spirals, and walk
upstairs, touching, as you go,
the espagnolette, which gives purchase
to your hand, opening inward
where the first bijou gleams like a clue
on a map that leads to the tiny globe
set in a stand so the hand can spin
a journey for the body to walk
between statuary, statue, and statuettes.
One giraffe taller than the jardinière’s
placed just inside the doorway,
where chimes announce a visitor
as the cuckoo clucks its hour.
Onward, then, in pilgrimage
toward walls on which sprays,
sconces, swags, fold their velvet creases
toward the sun you crave in blinded
spigots, and become aware
of the grandfather clock, the girandole
upon whose five stars wax beaded,
held the shape of the last supper.
Farther then, into the walk-through,
where all manner of salver make you
salivate, though you’re barely able
to enter this kitchen without breaking a tazza.
Call it ornament, nonetheless
cuspidation’s been at work here
with its lures, objets trouvés, and patens.
Menorah, modillion, and monteith
conspire to fill each space with curios,
non-alcoholic punch the latter’s
last drink, and, continue inward, your eyes
see patterns, kaleidoscopic, pontypooled
now from fatigue of many nights spent
awake in this elaborate house,
several diptychs open, too many trinkets
offering up to sight a sense of curios.
And then the single crucifix,
round which vermiculation troubles
background. So far the journey
into a place of decoration remains
gilded more than guild, until you realize
this flat represents an age.
The tiny piano holds its smile,
the triptych’s no more three-dimensional
than the diptych’s two, and no, nothing
blesses you in ultima. It’s simply suggestion—
the serving of yellowed beverages,
the hallway littered with collections
from antiquity when you began to leave
bizarre calling cards on the shelf
beside that speculum in the foyer.
There, an antique door’s French panes,
changed from glass to mirrors, where—
you?—your face?—gone from flesh
to quatrefoil hangs, the hangdog look of an elder,
a random personage of no great value, in that
you—(do you see?) have come three flights
up to worship horizontals.
Copyright © 2018 by Judith Skillman.
