In Lieu of a Window

CORRODED METAL

What I found was a flat piece of metal, corroded, pocked, and shaped quite like a cloud. I hung it over the sink in lieu of a window and looked at it. We wonder what, if anything, objects want, if only our rearranging satisfies some hidden need not only of ours but of theirs. Things found in the gutter and rescued, we say, are given another life, but as what—to be looked at, handled, to be made into what one wills, as if one were still a child and had no sense of the so-called value of a thing, but could find in a coil of wire, a bit of cardboard, a flat piece of metal all the possible worlds one might want, given time enough to conjure. So perhaps it is this—this time of seeming eternity that objects want and have no way of requesting, just as we have no way of guaranteeing either for them or for ourselves. —Martha Ronk, Transfer of Qualities