I just love my office! I thought I'd give a little tour along with this poem.

Dance of the Bower Bird

Much much much--
So much foraged and scrounged and mined,
          flotsam and tokens
                    of strangers' delight.

The button, the tin horn, the donkey on wheels.
Why grasp and sort and order and cling
          to so many insignificant things?

Perhaps it's a buttress--
          some scaffold or truss--
To brace such a gossamer sense of the self.
An essence intangible, faceted, fey,
          mirrored in piles and stacks on the shelf.
Some bone deep desire to be utterly known.

Or perhaps it's the singing--
The songs that things sing--
Those ballads and blessings that soften the silence.
          the whispery torch songs,
                    the tittering chanteys--
The airs of the orphaned, the broken and lost.
Those calls from the lonely and castaway stuff.

Or perhaps it's the mystery,
Those lives and those loves,
          enveloped, absorbed
                    when flesh delights in a thing.
Making something a poem,
          a cocoon morphing wings.
The bridge to another life--
          a story,
                   a touch.