Paintings

COLLECTIBLES

by Katha Pollitt

Even jumbled here in the schoolyard rummage sale

they keep their spirits up. This battered tin

combination cheese-and-nutmeg shaver

still offers “ ‘Greetings’ from Fort Lauderdale,”

this bunch of velvet violets breathes a pale,

still shocking scent of lingerie, and here

( but where’s your mate? your shiny silver cap? )

is—can it be?—the purple jug-shaped blown-

glass saltshaker from my parents’ breakfast table.

A manic friendliness infuses these

things that mostly look like other things—

the tomato that holds thread, the black-and-white

kitten teapot, one paw raised for spout—

like toys that in a child’s dream play all night

or like the magic kitchens in cartoons

where pots and pans leap down from the shelf and dance

and the orange squeezer oompahs like a tuba.

Innocent, foolish, jaunty, trivial,

small travelers from a land that thought it was

so full of love and coziness and cheer

the least things shared in it—why should

they pain us so somehow, who know so well

it wasn’t like that, not really, even then?

Is that what they have come so far to tell us?

That we lose even what we never had?