Ditch
The bottle shattered flat in its shape, a sheet of slivers
held together by its labels. Heavy machinery, I guess,
had smashed it to splinters in the dirt-side of the ditch.
By handhold clumps of weed roots, I picked a way down
toward the culvert, its hollow whine of tires.
Trickle of water in the bottom and trash in the pool
of yesterday’s rain. Some dimples on the surface,
waterbugs or tadpoles or minnows, I was hoping.
I wish I could tell you how it felt when the sliver
slipped in the flesh of my thumb. I didn’t feel anything
but knew it had happened the instant it happened.
The shard thin as a needle, green as a blade of grass.
It didn’t hurt at all until I caught it and wiggled it
and pulled it clean like a tooth from its socket.
It spurted like a geyser, like a whale harpooned
in the lung, a spout of bright blood from the blow-hole.
I wasn’t afraid, not a bit, just fascinated watching
the bleed rise with each pump of the pulse. My pulse.
I let it work a little, then put some pressure on it.
A cold rinse under the faucet and it was done.
Eventually I got to the bottom and collected bottles,
two brown whiskies, a green Coca-Cola, a cobalt-blue
milk of magnesia. I poked through mud and found
a broken-blade pocket knife still good for something.
Wet bleeding funny pages littered all over.
Blondie in high-heels sweeping glass in the kitchen,
Dagwood in the doghouse, Mr. Dithers ringing
the doorbell. There at last was a story.
Ditches are everywhere to climb into and hide
or recover hidden things from. The midden
of a woodrat can go back 50,000 years,
layers of time cemented with dung, urine,
shiny coins, spoons, a glass eye. In our own
Pacific garbage patch the size of Texas,
and visible from space, most of our plastic floats,
collecting and spinning in an ugly widening gyre.
Trash it seems is never lost, it’s where we find
who we are and what we do with our time.
When I look at the moon, I try not to think of
what we’ve ditched there. The news we make
is a mess of broken things we’ve bombed or blown up,
concrete, rebar, wires, pipes, glass — ravages we’re leaving
as slow or as fast as we can — who knows where next?
Often I think about Plato’s cave, its prisoner bound
with nothing to look at but flickering shadows,
everything in the world he could know and think about.
Riveted and so limited, he was of course wrong.
Something in us must take blind chances.
Consider the cave of Lascaux. What man or woman
thought beauty should be — needed to be — hidden away?
A boy and his dog following their instincts found it
and dug down to its animals running in the dark.
I’d like to lower myself down in those pictures.