Candace Black

Blue and White

In a busy city you stopped, and thinking
of me, fingered trinkets, deciding at last on a small

box the clerk suggested could be used to store Cocaine.

Or dope. Or cocaine. Is it size or beauty
that determines function? Too small to hold a life’s

paperwork—the passports, the mortgage,

certificates of birth and death we keep
in the bank’s vault—too lovely

for the desk’s minutiae of paper clips, transit

tokens, change foreign and domestic, keys whose lost locks
will return the day we purge ourselves of the past.

You apologized for the box’s base: not silver,

though just as shiny, malleable tin
embossed with a layered border of flowering

vine. The porcelain cover a shard,

the accompanying statement tells us, of Ming
or Ching vase destroyed by Red Guards.

I’ve lived through too many revolutions

of my own, been lied to by presidents,
my children, a culture on its way down, to really believe

enough fragments were hoarded for decades

to supply a suddenly available market.
But it doesn’t matter if my piece of blue

and white, concave just enough to suggest

the gentle slope of vase neck swelling
into shoulder, is any different than plates of carp

hanging on the yoga studio walls, or the cache pots

grocery crocus spring from, or the teapot thrown
in for a literal song by the bemused secondhand

jeweler, or the collection trundled

onto the estate’s grounds for televised assessment.
Nothing’s been restored, just made whole

from something broken.

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