Timothy Kercher
Roll Top Desk
The hull of a desk breaks the hearth, its many drawers like oaken sails, and the yearning of another century enters. And as he sits in his chair, the immensity of wood-craft before his birth is overwhelming, the implicit understanding that space upon wood space is space for the soul to wander within its own home. Home! Home free and off the track after so many years. Like a master’s throat sliced. Like a world growing larger in respect to one’s boots. He walks to the titanic deck and grabs a pen. He understands that a bearing bears to be reassessed. The surface stained, patina aged, escutcheon fit for only an older key. But keys! He has had few in his life, the chiseled teeth biting down upon doorways, the double twist of foreign locks. He knows that the liberty and limits of entrance are temporary. The desk shuts like a century ending. When it opens, it unrolls like an ancient scroll.
The Trail’s End
The ride was a washed shirt owned for ten years. He expected something new, but all the old stains appeared. The rocks, the bends and curves, the bone yard. And the muscle ripped in his back was forgotten, the ride itself amnesia, insomnia. Through the bicycle he could feel the surface of the earth. Each moment he changed position, but left the portion of himself that had ridden the trail before him. Thousands of him on a timeline of dirt. Millions of him breathing the dust. Each one tired but ecstatic like worshippers on pilgrimage. Each one scurrying over each other’s backs like mice. Each with the appearance of riding forward, but at a standstill. Like an audience waiting for the climax, a stadium full of his own selves waiting. He, a million pilgrim souls, seeking the end of a trail he already knows.
