A curator is supposed to stay out of the picture: the person who arranges, labels and guards other people's treasures. Dave Bonta's "Curator" turns that job inward. Its speaker stands among "things I found" and quickly admits that the most carefully handled object in the room is himself. Ageing here is not something that happens to him. It is something he does: "I have made myself old." The poem then undercuts any solemnity this might have, ending on the shrug of a cliché. In about thirty-five words, it holds together pride, self-mockery and a surprising tenderness.
Start with the setting. "Up here" is left unexplained, and the poem benefits. It could be an attic, an upper gallery, or the inside of the speaker's own head. The later phrase "light-headed" nudges the reader towards altitude or giddiness, though that is an inference, not something the poem confirms. What matters is the verb in the next line: the objects were "found," not bought, commissioned or inherited. A collection of found things is a collection shaped by chance and attention, and the poem itself reads like one: a handful of items set side by side with no explanation.
The central confession arrives in the third and fourth lines. "I have made myself old / a copy of a good original." Because there is no punctuation, the first line can stand alone as a complete and rather startling claim. The second then slides in as a kind of gloss, turning the claim into a confession of imitation. "Made" is a craftsman's word, even a forger's, and it suggests the way furniture is distressed to look antique. The poem never says who or what the "good original" is. It might be an older person the speaker has come to resemble, or a younger self, or simply some ideal of a life. That vagueness is deliberate. What the line does give us is a double attitude: the speaker admires the original and accepts that he is only a copy. Fittingly, this is the longest line in the poem, as if the copying takes more effort than anything else.
The next couplet piles up contradictions. Someone who has "made myself old" would be expected to feel seasoned, yet he is "light-headed and raw," a phrase that suggests thin skin and unfinished business. Then comes "profane as a lived-in book." The word "profane" comes from a Latin root meaning outside the temple, and it is the natural enemy of everything a museum treats as sacred. A lived-in book is one with creased spine, thumbed pages and perhaps coffee rings. Curators say "do not touch"; this simile says the opposite. The speaker would rather be handled and worn than preserved under glass, and he claims that kind of damage as a mark of life.
Then the poem swerves. "Or a little orange horse" is the only splash of colour in the piece and the most childlike image in it, a small toy-like thing (my inference) that arrives without warning. The word "or" implies the list could go on and that the speaker is trying out comparisons rather than settling on one. The final line, "which is old hat," deflates everything before it. The idiom means stale and unfashionable, and it echoes "old" from the second couplet. The speaker seems to concede that all this self-display, the carefully curated ageing and the quirky objects, is nothing new. The *h* sounds in "horse" and "hat" make the ending clipped and offhand, like someone waving away their own seriousness.
Formally, the poem is five couplets in lowercase, unpunctuated and unrhymed. The couplets read like shelves, each holding a pair of items. The line lengths vary, short at the start and end, stretched in the middle, so the rhythm feels spoken, like someone thinking aloud while sorting through a box.
The poem is worth reading because it makes self-portraiture honest by making it modest. It does not claim to be an original; it says outright that it is a copy. It prefers a worn, handled life to a polished one, and it laughs at its own gesture before the reader can. That mix of vulnerability and humour is hard to manage in so little space.