fallen angel heads: the archive

NORBERT BLEI

Finders Keepers

Find me in the desk drawer near the loose paper clips, broken pencils, illegible notebooks, old knives, dead fountain pens, wooden matches, faded love letters, and holy cards of the Blessed Mother...In Loving Memory of (mother) Passed Away: Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; ...he said. Find me in the back pocket with the loose button of the gray woolen pants on the bent hanger in the closet. The glove compartment with the water-stained yellow receipt for new brakes, faded road maps of Wisconsin, and the photograph torn in half under the seat of the white van stripped of engine parts and licence plates near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. In the coal bin of my father's basement and the wooden hand-painted black and red tool chest belonging to a great uncle who tuned pianos in Chicago at the turn of the century and saw visions of saints on fire flying round the parlor ceiling at night. In the hole of the prairie earth dug with boyish hands, covered with weeds and sticks to trap WWII Germans and Japs in the heart of the old neighborhood; and the package of Lucky Strike cigarettes stashed near the roots of a catalpa tree, under the rock the size and shape of a man's head. In the black leather pocketbook hanging forever from the wrist of the grandmother-who-sewed...buttons,seeds, hair pins, string, folded dollar bills, pennies, peppermint candy, a lace white handkerchief with a fancy letter K embroidered in red. The cellar of the northern farmhouse with shelves of preserves and Babi's glass egg wrapped in a paisley babushka. The bucket in back of the garage holding a chisel, glass doorknobs, broken hacksaw blade, spool of wire, lock washers, a Wisconsin license plate 1939, the split handle of a screw driver. The scented pillowcase beneath the woman's sleeping head, her pills, a pearl-handled knife, a gold band, a rosary, a pair of black stockings, a torn photograph of an uncertain lover...the other half of him.