The memory of silver is long.  It
remembers fat, leathery hands
casting ingots at dawn.  And the
screaming crucible that served life
plucked from death.

Sterling arcs of recollection whisper
in morning’s meekness, dangling from
emerald shadows, hanging on for a
cue, regarding us warily with one eye
open and one eye closed.

The memory of silver is long.  It
remembers both she who bestowed
and she who received on that distant
Christmas afternoon, before bread
was broken under jaundiced
light.

Violet glass despondently rolls off a
negligent palm, falling upon moist
linoleum, making no sound in daybreak’s
din…shaking off all visions of times
gone by on the way down.