A Story About Things

To be required to dust
furniture and books and appliances,
the contours of them conjuring
not memory

but silence;
to be instructed

to become, if not a part of them,
then in conversation—
a strange bedside lamp I have hated
since childhood
and yet from which
I could not turn away:

no switch: who invented such a thing—
the atrocity of a brass lamp's body
sensing the human touch
and giving light
spontaneously, easily, as though

to touch and to see were equal halves
of the same original act:

I pretend so hard, I am the sun.

Copyright © 2007 Heather Maki All rights reserved
from Beloit Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission