Keith Waldrop, “A Matter of Collage”:
Things seem to collect around me, wherever I go, in the same way ideas occur as if from nowhere, and since I have always balked at throwing anything out I sometimes imagine my house simply a context for unexpected items. I write under much the same compulsion: whether local images or abstract concepts, whatever interests me I hold on to as best I can and a poem is my formal grip. Everyone knows how a painter can put the most disparate things into a single picture—Jesus Christ, for instance, along with a Dutch windmill—and they are seen then in a single light.
[…]
ANTIQUARY
Some people try, before cashing in, to make
their lives into shrines. Mine seems to be turning out,
as predicted, a small provincial museum, the kind
that might have in some corner or other one work
you could be interested in, if you knew it was there.