The Fertility Festival

Bring out all your saved copper.
The salvage men are here!
Bring out the replaced sink;
Bring out the supplanted mattresses.
In their caps and gloves
They parade through our streets,
Nodding, giving the occasional wave.
Bring out your only slightly broken
Power tools. Bring out
The child’s outgrown tricycle.
There are inspectors and salvers
Who give cash, and those
Who make repairs. It is all so
Ordinary, and we place our junk
On the lawn at the end of the parade:
Where items are twisted and tested
And amounts settled on.
Oh, the price does not matter.
The fact that this detritus,
Which anyone can collect all about one’s life,
Is the focus of this much pomp and skill
Astounds us with hope;
And so it then seems
That our inept pairing and mercurial mating,
Conceiving yet more like ourselves –
For at least this one chilling,
Junk drunken night –
Is not so cunningly unthinkable.