Treasure Desk

You can discover all sorts of treasures in the forgotten drawers of your desk. A champagne flute, headphones, small Shakespeare volumes, a health club membership card, wires, a painting. My favorite finding was a stack of pictures. Pictures are quintessential, and they always will be, even when paper goes out the door. Nothing can replace that tiny relic of a past age, that snapshot, the particular birth and death of a moment you never could recognize. My pictures are particular, faded: Dad and my nannu, in crushed velvet suits and bowties, smiling on a lawn; a friend ecstatic on icelandic ice; remy and keegan sipping from glass bottles; a blue car; a stack of logs. Photographs are worlds within worlds, the more you scrutinize the less you know. And this is their secret beauty. I'd like to venture back to that lawn, and stand on the grass, awaiting the next lightbulb flash or summer breeze, but it won't happen. There's no return, there's only imagination. I come to that revelation most every day.