Facsimile Mantelpiece [poem and photo by Angela Ball]

Ed note: A few weeks ago, Angela Ball visited David and me in Ithaca, NY.  One morning over coffee, Angela showed me pictures of her lovely home in Mississippi, where she lives and teaches. I was struck by the arrangement of objects on her mantelpiece and asked for the story behind each. This poem is Angela's reply. Thank you, Angela. sdl: 

photo(c)Angela Ball

Arranging things on a mantel you have latitude
the longitude is missing just the latitude
to choose things
A series of completions or 
incompletions; in 2014, John Ashbery’s husband
said of their interior, “It’s probably the last
version” but so changed
now as is James Tate’s
the house of the strangest yard sale
that after a warm rainy breakfast
of intersections and messages
asked me
to choose

Size of course is always relative
The red scarf above the fez-capped man, the wiener
mobile, Dagwood, and R2D2
could wrap their Central Park, their Yosemite; maybe
their outer space
The mirror is an ocean
propped to the wall
As for the miniature edition of James Wright’s
The Branch Will Not Break
its largess
saved many from the wish
to give up before beginning
This ragtag display’s password
might be “generous”
since below it, in summer,
no edited forest burns

The man with the fez is some remote relative of the Shriners who swooped down the hospital hill
gripping the steering wheels of their midget cars on the very day a newborn was presented to a
mother by the gull-wing armature of a nun. And it is this very Zebra-cat with its free birdseed
who is now heard neighing, meowing, and trilling from a James Tate poem standing alone near a
cotillion of fruit trees and Minnow-Bucket Road

Angela Ball directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Scarlet, and a volunteer cat, Whisker. Her most recent book is Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press).