116 Journal of American Culture Spoils

Carolyn Moore

Korea, 1951 In winter war and mud an ivory m e gleams too much for bone. My father toes up bowls small as kneecaps. Bowls buried for keeping, the home burned flat. Bowls hidden with care but dead in the path of the tank grunting closer. Already the earth quakes at the twin treads curled like giant pillbugs on the roll.

A shame to crush such nice playdishes for the daughter growing up without him. Surely salvation and salvage sucker off a common root? Taking bowls wasn’t stripping corpses.

His next step sank him thigh-deep in a buried crock of kimchee. All the war long fermenting cabbage judged my father’s boots.

Moon-white bowls cupping worn inscriptions came cradled in a sour whiff of excelsior. My mother never spoke of them. She shut them up.

From far-off Oregon my mother shipped my childhood loot. Seashells, a book of pressed leaves- safe and labeled collections of things grown dry and silent.

Then the shock of bowls thin as breath, frail as plates in babies’ skulls. Bowls with gold inscriptions worn faint and silent as the mouth on the man in the moon.

1970

I could not throw them out. Words like cloud and mushroom had long since housebroken the unnatural and now fed it daily under the sink.

What if the spoils of one war are mule& against the next? If a single Korean bowl broke, a baby’s head in Vietnam might fail to harden against the crush of giant pillbugs rolling two by two in search of a monstrous ark.

I990 Lost and silenced in a cupboard’s ghetto the bowls slept forgotten until now. Today my husband‘s Korean friend gave us a jar of swirled and souring cabbage. It knew me without my father’s bods. Kimchee won the refrigerator war and room by room is pickling the house.

Kimchee morning, earthquake night. I wait in bed for the aftershock. Somewhere in this world guns bicker, Here, sleep serves as truce in a war between two armies of a soldier each. My husband’s dreams wheeze through goosedown. Will sour cabbage always haunt his beard?

Darkness thickens between us. Clouds grow gauze, muffle and pack off the chipped moon

Again the earth shakes its fur. Objects that have lost their way stir, ready to give witness. China and crystal are on the march. Othm poise for slaughter at the gulf.

Cupboards grunt open onto air gone sour. A glass truce is broken. A porcelain shriek

Silence pulses in the waiting,

xcs cloud-high.

Curve by ivory curve the moon slices through scooped faceless by the effort. Its eyes blur out cheekbones dissolve mouth gasps so wide it has black sky for lips.

On a shelf of cloud the moon teeters, a bowl cupping worn inscriptions.