kiss the architrave, I stretch my first-waking fingers out to them. They trick my eyes after a bad night, fade too quickly to ungilded daylight. When you drop a glob of gold on your palm you can feel it pressing down, feel it wanting to sink into the mantle again. And I’m back in the long, wood-plank work room of my grandfather’s town house, bunsen burner and a gauze, melding all the spits of king metal shaved away from crowns and his other gnasher craftings into a nugget the size of my ten-year-old thumb, fresh and bright and perfect as the day it was split from the rock. Still dozing, I roll away in the sheets, think of Chaplin and the bear and the tilting cabin, his Gold Rush masterpiece. He put the hours in, always the work first, to the point of madness, he called it. I should be up already and at the desk, pounding at the keys. No gold bar glee hidden under my mattress, no pirate coins in the garden. But the gold wash of dawn always finds me, a gift glimpsed from under the pillow, my ersatz riches, my poor man’s treasure.
