INVITATION

You invite me to climb an attic stair
Up to a playwright’s secret lair, where tokens of a life’s love,
To be unrobed, and made bare, were hidden away from all light and the air.

Trinkets and treasures and baubles and more,
Dimly lit memories, unremembered, unmoored.
Costumes, tossed plumes,
Piles of the fading and crumpled, imbued with a sense of
A time lost or just jumbled.

In this sky parlour, this long-ago nest
I see in your eyes a shimmer, a sparkle.