A Chinese Bowl

A Chinese Bowl

-Katha Pollitt

Plucked from a junk shop

chipped celadon

shadow of a swallow's wing

or cast by venetian blinds

on tinted legal pads

one summer Saturday

in 1957.

Absorbed at his big desk

my father works on briefs.

The little Royal makes

its satisfying clocks

stamping an inky nimbus

around each thick black letter

with cutout moons for "O"s

curled up on the floor,

I'm writing, too: "Bean Soup

and Rice," a play about

a poor girl in Kyoto

and the treasure-finding rabbit

who saves her home. Fluorescent 

light spills cleanly down

on the Danish-modern couch

and metal cabinet

which hides no folder labelled

"blacklist" or "Party business"

or "drink" or "mother's death."

I think, This is happiness,

right here, right now, these

walls striped green and gray,

shadow and sun, dust motes

stirring the still air

and a feeling gathers, heavy

as rain about to fall,

part love, part connection,

part inner solitude

where is that room, those gray-

green thin-lined

scribbled papers

littering the floor?

How did

I move so far away,

just living day by day,

that now all rooms seem stange,

the years all error?

Bowl,

what could

I drink from you,

clear green tea

or iron-bitter water

that would renew

my fallen life?


This poem strikes me as something that I could imagine myself writing five years from now. Of course mine would not be exactly the same story line, but I can definitely relate to this poem. The narrator had grown comfortable in the home she grew up in with her father. She explains what her home was like before she left and then she says she wishes she could go back to then.
A part of the poem that sticks out to me is when the narrator explains what is not stored in the file cabinets. The expressions of "blacklist," "Party business," and "drink" could be anyone's educated guess as to what they mean. I would like to say that they refer to the father's occupation and personal life, but I cannot find any support from the rest of the text that agrees. However, the expression "mother's death" surly refers to the narrator's mother dying. What I find interesting about this is that it is referred to something that is not in the filing cabinet. Could that be saying that it is something that is out-of-sight-out-of-mind or is meant to be out in the open and not locked away in a filing cabinet. To me, these expressions seem like things that are kept in a box for a reason and act as they are forgotten.
A Chinese Bowl can obviously act as a bowl that the narrator picked up and has consistently used at home and away from home. I saw the Chinese bowl as something more than just an empty bowl, I saw it as an item that the narrator uses to connect back to home. She can take her bowl and use it as an escape from her new life and be transported to her life at home. She became so used to her life at home with her Chinese bowl, when she left, she had to rely on items that would remind her of home. 
Another thing I noticed throughout this poem was the repetition of the colors of green and gray. The author uses it to describe the walls of her home, the color of paper on the floor, and the type of liquid being held in the Chinese bowl. Are the colors being used as symbols for something else, or are they just being used repetitively? Either way, they definitely have some significance to the poem. Maybe they are the colors or the bowl.