Quinsigamond Inventory #S 3-27
3. Beaded seed ball of a fruitless house. A globe glommed from smaller globes. Proffered on a
cotton lily pad. Artifice resisting dust. Fibroid for which were filched fallopians and ovaries.4. “Mountain” and “Laurel” yoked by a dash. In serifed letters, drawn with primitive elegance.
Hand-set, irregularly applied, as if rubber stamped over the upholstery. A bay fragrance, an
imperturbable élan.8. Sole acorn on dock corner. Its cap a hive of protuberances, fingers piled high and round,
reaching for salt. The nut a rocket head chocked with fission. Hopes it floats, hopes it rots and
roots.9 & 10. Tall tin man with sheen of tan. Bless you, your nose tilted towards Saturn, your kinfolk
kenned on Easter Island. Someone has draped, has bejeweled your left ear with glass teardrops
lassoed in lead.11. Wooden mallard windometer, mounted here since all the accidents, its red eye slung with
what drained from windlassed veins.12. The owl of Minerva/Sulis/Athena with its backside to the boatdock. It tunes its tinny ear to
the wakes of jet skis, cautions the confabulations of irreligious conjoined in a Congregational
church.13. A diorama in diorite. A peepshow of the Pleistocene. Fieldstone pied with rust and butter.
14, 15 & 16. Showing its sole to a counterfeit pond, the seated plaster jockey fishes through
spiderwebs and seasons, its oversize sunglasses shading its wide-eyed and astonished glare,
chipped lips locked against philosophy or spite, cocoa hands dandling the totem pole of a
magnificent miscegenation.17. Frog Buddha who ferreted the secrets of the house, whose flypaper tongue turned to stone
the savings bonds and Patek-Phillipe watch buried in the basement. In his eternal crouch, he
seems hung with songs that never skirt or spring, casting his grin like a shadow over unearthed
shades.18. Impatient for New Guinea, scarlet petals torched with tricklings from shark teeth. In a teddy
this red, the mistress of the house once teased a backroom where Mexico mariachis for South
San Francisco.19. Mounted on the new fence, househusband modeled in sandpaper. A forged weathering, a
patina applied with BB shot and sponge. Hair raked back in ridges, held in place by faux granite
and not mineral oil. His unpainted eyes have shaped themselves to longing unleashed by
pontoons, to islands abandoned for miniature railways marooned across the shore.20. Hand clasping invisible shaft, hand closing for cleating ropes, hand about to clamp a roach,
to dash cigar ash, pry plum tomato or pinch basil top before it totters to seed, hand signifying
measure or mourning, hand for handling bird and bush.21. White cat crumpled in the snow of the sun.
22. A courting couple of colonial Dutch kinder, their pupils like distended olives, their foreheads
teeter dangerously proximate for a squeamish age.25, 26 & 27. On string tied just below her sternum, doll swings over gruesome plunder. Her
porcelain-white skin flakes and chips, leprous, giving way to measles and relics of bruises. Her
left eye alert, her right eye dulled to hurt. Her lips shrunken from testimonies, from poker-faced
mornings holding her scolded tongue.27. In a tin box wrapped in plastic and chained with meager links, the mother ashes endure
indignity with the same restless inventiveness that concealed from the world a radiant bestiality.
Funeral friends hoisted hats, daughters donned dresses shining black and blue.