In this week’s poem, Patricia Smith Ranzoni’s “Provenance,” we hear of a salvaged artifact, a recollection about growing up poor, and a musing on the nature of treasure. I love this poem’s rush of memory and description, and its poignant reflections on “the danger some / beauty can be to the world.”
Ranzoni writes from Bucksport, where she is poet laureate and co-chairs the effort to found a paper-making museum. Descending from subsistence wood- and water-working people from before Maine became a state, whose artifacts can still be found in the hedgerows, she is self-taught in poetry in the folk tradition of her family through the generations. Her work has appeared most recently in the 2022 issues of The Island Journal, Maine Arts Journal and the Italian journal Tellūs.
Provenance
By Patricia Smith Ranzoni
I’ve carried and propped it house
to house since rescuing it from
the trashcan in the garage where
we rented, starting out, on that yacht-
ing road out of state. How could they
have thrown it away? The top of a
lacquered cigar-size box, tiny-hinged,
unhinged, one corner chipped a bit.
Black shellac lined. Maroon cover
with full moon river, a golden night-
pallet for pine needle sprays, fan-like,
painted thin as hair, a bonsai setting
for a nesting pair of herons or are they
cranes or some other majestic bird
known to the Orient where the elegant-
stepping officer, himself, was stationed
or was he a diplomat? Curved and
carved axe on the hall stairway wall
over a framed photograph of a be-
heading showing how it was used,
the makings of a nightmare on our way
up to sleep. Remember what I told you,
sitting in my lap, how something
refused from a fairy tale might be
someone else’s beauty, story, wings.
How lucky, growing up poor, that what
some see as flaw we carry in awe. As
this, kept for our family history’s sake,
now being bestowed on you, the way
I’ve always taught of the danger some
beauty can be to the world, hoping, see-
ing it before you, I could save you some
suffering, sister, where will you prop it?
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Provenance,” copyright 2023 by Patricia Smith Ranzoni, appears by permission of the author.
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