Idols and Treasure

This fragment had a life that's past - or is there meaning still?

Its presence here beneath the eaves

confronts me. Requires me to seek and know:

Do you - frail, poignant thing - care now for me?

And should I now have love for you?

Can I perhaps give love anew?

Enjoy (as someone did) your threads,

your unrelenting hue?

Or hurt some woman's heart

beating within myself, if

banishing you forever,

I banish her - a little more?

Can a thing (stitches - shape - design)

translate the un-thing, human life?

Here we are - just us two

on one unsettling day in time.

Only a shadow in the morning's feeble light

to tell and not to tell

what it is you mean to me -

or should.

But in a dream, an ancestor smiles -

she who traveled west, taking nothing but

the compact baggage of her memories and love

"the which," she said,

"had proved sufficient

in the end."

Instantly, from her unseen reticule,

more is given me for sustenance

on journeys of my own

than all the trunkloads full of treasure

I have worshipped,

standing still.