Keys

Something nicely anachronistic about keys. Despite all the electronic buttons and cards, they have hung on. Photographing (or writing about them) immediately summons their other property, a symbolic resonance powerful as the moon: keys call for a door, something to be opened or locked, a heart, a kingdom.

As I wander to and fro in the subterranean dimness of our long, old-fashioned apartment, I keep my eye out for stray patches of sunlight as the clouds shift gear outside, slanting through the two narrow arched (barred) windows near the kitchen. These are set into the upper half of a heavy old door that opens to stone steps down to the back yard. I have often noticed these keys jutting below the handle (a plastic replacement for the old brass on that eventually fell apart). The door is both protective and imprisoning. And there is something about the way the sun spotlights the keys, edges in just enough to imprint a bony shadow. But I never seemed to catch it at precisely the right time: around four in the evening, till today.

Incidentally, this musing about sunlight on keys reminds me of a little poem of mine (from the second book, The Sky Road). It refers to the narrow 'roof-light' or 'light-box' above the entrance to the large passage tomb at Newgrange, hence the title:

LIGHTBOX

Everyone should have one
dark hub for the dull day's orbit:

stoneshouldered wings
where you bury the bones

of belief, and the redfaced sun,
to gain entrance, turns

a skeleton key.