Eight epiphanies

A green glass telegraph insulator
made in 1912, to catch the sunlight.

A lidded box full of antique keys
none any longer fitting an existing lock.

A handful of white quartz crystals
partly smoothed by waves of a large lake.

Eighteen bound notebooks, many colours,
filled by one hand, changing over time.

A print, from Beijing, of thirteen white cranes
standing in reeds during a snowstorm.

A colour photograph of a man climbing
the side of a narrow green copper steeple.

A Solingen pen knife with a brown bone handle, well-worn,
but carefully sharpened, smelling of pipe tobacco.

A harlequin doll, with a red wooden nose
that winds a hidden music box to play
a beautiful, unidentifiable melody.

These are clues
scattered across
tangled through
one life only
perhaps meaningless
to any other
no accounting for
seeming random things
that have become
by chancy alchemy
concrete symbols
of inner events
that one carries
like talismans
in a charm bag,
for remembering.

I won't explain them,
but will hold them up
so that you may see them
and imagine your own poems.