The Goodness of Created Things

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Amber, formerly pine sap where ant wings settled, feathers, the occasional 
tiny frog. A drop of the Jurassic Age I wear around my neck.  

A Chop Wizard with its plastic cup, blades, hand crank tearing into the 
onion like a cheetah, membrane and flesh.  

Framed color plates of The Wild Flowers of England, from which I am 
learning bladder wort, purple spurge, and four varieties of orchis. 

Caprese salad. Tomatoes and fresh basil I attribute to God, but the peas-
ants of Capri imagined they could milk a buffalo.  

Middlemarch, giving me the English Midlands whole and Dorothea, led 
trusting into The Key to All Mythologies—its twisted passages, miasmas, 
vampire bats—and coming back alive.  

Rachmaninoff’s “Eighteenth Variation on a Theme of Paganini” in a 
music box of Italian inlaid wood I inherited from my mother. Sound 
pure as mountain bluebells, mechanism Swiss.  

A Swarovski pen in rose pearl, my maroon suede notebook, a copper 
gill. Hand-tatted snowflakes.  

Many items still to come offered now and then by the sensual god, the 
god of extend yourself, the god of small beautiful puzzles, the god of 
this was your mother’s—all the minor gods of happiness and taste.