The PlateBy Jennifer Marysia Landretti
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In the shallows of Lake Superior
I found what once was a bowl
or cup—a thing rinsing
away among the eggs of earth
and cradled just now
in my palm.
The shape spoke to me, said
I am the tooth of a fabulous inland whale;
my food was the fur of shipwrecks
and inhalations of sunken light.
Said, I’m not that at all
but a castaway of this haunted shore,
home of Puk Wudgiinees, native folk, no higher than a hairbrush,
who kneel in the stones and rub your flotsam in moonlight.
They sniff what they snatch and test
by biting: some they hide in the wood
of candled aspen. Most they fling aside
with the clean contempt of spirits.
Said, truth be told I’m a composition of disaster,
retainer of an edge your natural philosophers dreamed of
finding. Put another way I’m a fragment of fog,
relic lifted from mists inside you.
This blue scribble?
The world looking in,
remembering!
Before all these things that had been
given, I had to ask myself: what was true
or not? I weighed the evidence in hand:
inch of undulant ivory, blueberry filigree,
and said that what I held was nothing
more than the edge of a dinner plate
To which the filigree replied, Yes!
But wrong! For my artful tangle is the heart of a plate
from your childhood, the blue of a woods
into which you gazed while parting gravy
with bread. Here is the branch above the one-horse sleigh
on a snow-fat bridge; where your wet palm now
shines sat a couple deep in their coats,
wrapped in blue blankets, buried under meat,
under your mother’s flapjacks, the eggs bright in fat--
all those messy weathers of your appetite!
As you ate how your mind filled
with wonder: the eternal moment before you
uncovered by the modest cycles of a spoon.
I hesitated, one dry shoe on pebble slush,
the other rinsed by the lake. How curious, the perspective of a plate,
its acquaintance with the underside of things:
flanks of rainbow trout, hotcake bottoms,
the insides of soap bubbles to which the wrinkled fingers reach.
And what of years in a cupboard? To exist as one in a stack
of anterior perspectives, each with a phrase stamped on its underside,
that koan of crockery: Buffalo China.
What had this plate held? What clock ticked as a mother
still young, split an apple and turned to another
even as the halves continued rocking?
What child devoured her crumble and a little later
sat old before another plate, remembering?
Had it sat behind a door while steam boiled from the teacups of Hiroshima?
While an old conductor limped from his kitchen to see a boot touch the Sea of Tranquility?
Perhaps it sat on the shelf of a diner where men like Hemingway’s
Swede ate their eggs in doomed solitude.
Still, nothing so far says a thing about how the plate got into the Lake.
A picnic? You don’t love me, she says and heaves the plate,
with its coconut cream pie, toward a man ducking at the oars--
or perhaps it came from the sky, from sunset clouds,
tossed from a seaplane: My god in heaven, What a pie!
as out it goes, licked clean and retired like a sports jersey.
But all of this is just a circle of fancy
painted round a sleigh and its couple
on their way to a table set with love
and the breakup of their world.
I pocketed the plate.
Above the cliffs, at roadside,
dusk crazed the western clouds
and blueness ringed the sky.
The road home offered one darkness
lifting into another. I wheeled my way
up that winding road, wondering,
while the river sent its waters down
beneath a feast of stars.
I found what once was a bowl
or cup—a thing rinsing
away among the eggs of earth
and cradled just now
in my palm.
The shape spoke to me, said
I am the tooth of a fabulous inland whale;
my food was the fur of shipwrecks
and inhalations of sunken light.
Said, I’m not that at all
but a castaway of this haunted shore,
home of Puk Wudgiinees, native folk, no higher than a hairbrush,
who kneel in the stones and rub your flotsam in moonlight.
They sniff what they snatch and test
by biting: some they hide in the wood
of candled aspen. Most they fling aside
with the clean contempt of spirits.
Said, truth be told I’m a composition of disaster,
retainer of an edge your natural philosophers dreamed of
finding. Put another way I’m a fragment of fog,
relic lifted from mists inside you.
This blue scribble?
The world looking in,
remembering!
Before all these things that had been
given, I had to ask myself: what was true
or not? I weighed the evidence in hand:
inch of undulant ivory, blueberry filigree,
and said that what I held was nothing
more than the edge of a dinner plate
To which the filigree replied, Yes!
But wrong! For my artful tangle is the heart of a plate
from your childhood, the blue of a woods
into which you gazed while parting gravy
with bread. Here is the branch above the one-horse sleigh
on a snow-fat bridge; where your wet palm now
shines sat a couple deep in their coats,
wrapped in blue blankets, buried under meat,
under your mother’s flapjacks, the eggs bright in fat--
all those messy weathers of your appetite!
As you ate how your mind filled
with wonder: the eternal moment before you
uncovered by the modest cycles of a spoon.
I hesitated, one dry shoe on pebble slush,
the other rinsed by the lake. How curious, the perspective of a plate,
its acquaintance with the underside of things:
flanks of rainbow trout, hotcake bottoms,
the insides of soap bubbles to which the wrinkled fingers reach.
And what of years in a cupboard? To exist as one in a stack
of anterior perspectives, each with a phrase stamped on its underside,
that koan of crockery: Buffalo China.
What had this plate held? What clock ticked as a mother
still young, split an apple and turned to another
even as the halves continued rocking?
What child devoured her crumble and a little later
sat old before another plate, remembering?
Had it sat behind a door while steam boiled from the teacups of Hiroshima?
While an old conductor limped from his kitchen to see a boot touch the Sea of Tranquility?
Perhaps it sat on the shelf of a diner where men like Hemingway’s
Swede ate their eggs in doomed solitude.
Still, nothing so far says a thing about how the plate got into the Lake.
A picnic? You don’t love me, she says and heaves the plate,
with its coconut cream pie, toward a man ducking at the oars--
or perhaps it came from the sky, from sunset clouds,
tossed from a seaplane: My god in heaven, What a pie!
as out it goes, licked clean and retired like a sports jersey.
But all of this is just a circle of fancy
painted round a sleigh and its couple
on their way to a table set with love
and the breakup of their world.
I pocketed the plate.
Above the cliffs, at roadside,
dusk crazed the western clouds
and blueness ringed the sky.
The road home offered one darkness
lifting into another. I wheeled my way
up that winding road, wondering,
while the river sent its waters down
beneath a feast of stars.
Jennifer Marysia Landretti writes poetry and essays. Her themes are nature, place, and spirit--and in recent years, gender, which has served as a vector to explore the latter three. Her poetry has been accepted for publication in Braided Way, Merion West, Dawntreader magazine, and Sky Island Journal, among others. Her essays have been anthologized and have appeared most regularly in Orion magazine. For additional information about the author and to view more of her writings, please visit her website: jenniferlandretti.com
