PLACE SETTINGS
Elisavietta Ritchie
My mother's plates, gold-rimmed
Limoges, all matched, could serve
soup, fish, roast, salad, fruit,
cake and demi-tasses for thirty guests.
In my house, every dish is different.
Not just because six kids will break
six plates apiece within six years,
but husbands do get shaky, mad, or drunk.
Better they throw plates than us,
and I haunt yard sales and Goodwill,
glean jetsam from strange women's lives
perhaps as hazardous as mine but tidier:
when their wedding china dwindles
with the husbands, children, years,
to seven saucers, one chipped cup,
they dump them at the church bazaar.
I hoard poor-cousin cups, orphaned plates,
enrich my stock with fresh gene pools
from other clans, so what one bowl's plum
clashes with some platter's rose.
I conjure how another's nicks,
chips and cracks occurred,
weigh her losses and my own
bargains and diversities.
