Philip Levine - Inheritance (Excerpt) lyrics

As a boy I would steal into Zadie's bedroom, find the watch in a velvet box, wind it, hold it to each ear — back then both worked — to hear its music, the j**eled wheels and axles that kept time alive. There is still such joy in these tokens from back of beyond: the watch, the Parker pen, the tiny pocket knife he used to separate truth from lies, the ivory cigarette holder — a gift, he claimed, from FDR who mistook him for a famous Russian violinist. I could call them “Infinite riches in a little room” or go cosmic and regard them as fragments of a great mystery instead of what they are, amulets against nothing.