Poetry by Donald Sellitti

Dina-Roberts Wakulczyk CC




Among the Things They Left Behind


They reappeared like houses from the Salton Sea,
made visible again because of something that had drained away.
Artifacts of childhood, preserved as if by airless mud 
from sunlight and the arid winds of time. 

Most of them unscathed by passing years, unlike the children
who came from every compass point to that still point 
of their turning earth to find them. 

My parents clung to everything as if they meant to take it with them
when they died .Their house a pharaoh’s tomb of  riches
left in jumbled heaps as if the wealth was plundered in antiquity.
Priceless treasures to no one but themselves.

Among the things they left behind, a rocking horse of cloying cuteness
cloned in untold numbers from a blueprint in a magazine.
A herd of wooden horses built by fathers home from war,
embracing sameness, feeling free. All painted white 
with scalloped manes of bright red hair and half-closed eyes on either side.

We all took turns at it, the five of us. We rocked it hard, 
and yet the handlebars were still in place; the eyes still big and wide as ever. 
Just like in its photo with the little boy in corduroy, whose
soft brown eyes proved lacking in the timelessness of painted ones.

Its appearance was unaltered from that time but for the absence
of the rockers underneath. The curving bands of plywood 
that are the essence of the thing. The last of us to ride had seen them go.
My parents kept it anyway. 

I claimed it as my own again and brought it home, an amputee 
still looking at the world through eyes as big as saucers. 
It found refuge in the basement among the toys 
my children left behind. A  painted wooden horse incapable of rocking. 
Completely useless, wasting space, beyond repair. But not going anywhere.

​


Donald Sellitti was a scientist/educator at a Federal medical school before turning to poetry following his retirement. His publications in medical journals such as Cancer Research and Oncology Letters have been succeeded by publications in a number of more amusingly titled journals, including The Alchemy Spoon, Door is A Jar, Gyroscope Review and Rat’s Ass Review, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize.



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