the kids just last week presented to me a
trim, stunted bottle unearthed by the rooting snouts of the
piglets in our garden bed out back
where the soil is still a rich virgin black.
i placed the vial on the sill of our kitchen window
above the sink and it still held the earth in it;
so besodded that the light outside labored against
an obscure passage through its thick glass:
the random specks of dirt constellations in an
unfocused universe
and so it is with memory, which is constantly
strained through the gauze of time,
filtered and abridged to the point of it all approaching
mere romance when it comes calling to the fore on
some trigger
like it did when i considered the bottle on its
new perch, with the world of light outside
peering back through it to me as i peered at
the world through the vial and in a moment i was
reminded of the cicadas and one summer day
(i am told to avoid the sentimental by sticking to
the showing of things and not the telling and by turning
the hand to the figurative and leaving the abstract out
in the withering cold - so i will attempt to here, but in truth i
am in love with this memory, all joy)
how my brother took me digging for bottles in august
one year when i was - perhaps - 10? that sounds about
right because i ached differently at 10 than i did at
13 when he was 20 and no longer at home
what lived inside of our conversation that day i do not
know, but i pretend to know by assigning this broader truth:
we said little, the way the mature and the immature
say little of substance to each other because of the
gap in age and understanding; especially brothers
this half-fiction, therefore, would have other voices in it:
namely the creak of the metal bucket that swung in one
of his hands while the other gripped the short handle
of our father's spade that my brother bore on a broad shoulder,
twirling the metal of the spade like a boat's propeller
or the flop of his Converses onto tar in our perspiry push
up hill against invisible wave on wave of swelter; how
our eyes stung against it and our lungs were filled with
the density of haze
or the cry of the dog day cicadas stuck in the limbs of
leafy ash and sugar maples and birches that stood
on either side in their own dense congregations; how
their everlasting saw was a hymnal to some prevailing dream echoing
a song of end-of-summer longing that hummed in my own heart
my brother borrowed the idea of bottle hunting from our
uncle, who scavenged for them as well, unearthing such
colorful curiosities of medicine glass that he would clean
and sell to various collectors
and my brother took it up and was adept at their discovery;
mining his own modest collections of blues and greens,
rounded and squared, long-necked and snub-nosed
that he too scrubbed, but that he kept for himself
posting his finds on window sills in his own bedroom
or upon the sills around our home. i marveled at their
altered optics, how staring through the antique glassware
was a lull toward divergent moods
the lighter colored bottles had me thinking of the
weightlessness of clouds observed from one's back in
a pasture; the darker colors of the fate of fallen leaves
into an autumn brook and how they could never resist the pull
he stopped at the top of the hill in front of a house and
he said he had been told it used to all be
farmland up here and how farmland was perfect for the
burial places of back-in-the-day houses and outbuildings
that all that was left were usually field stone foundations filled
in by the collapsed wooden bones of buildings,
piled upon by time with earth and leaves; that hidden beneath
that, with the point of the driven spade, could be found the bottles
i was a mere page to the leader of a great enterprise; on an
exploration led by a man knowing of the unknown world;
i marveled much less at the landscape than i did the shadow
that he cast across it, as younger brothers are apt to do of the older
all that needed to happen, he said, was permission from the
owner to allow us behind his property, down a hill to a place
i could barely make out as a thin line of a stone
wall at the edge of woods that, i imagined, once was miles of pasture
my brother rapped on the owner's door and we waited in the heat until a man
emerged daunted. looked my brother over. my brother in a pair of cut-off Levi's
with the bottoms of the pockets dog-panting out from beneath; my brother
with the long hair and a muscle shirt and shouldering a spade
he asked us what. said no to my brother's request. said no to my brother's plea.
come on, man. my little brother with me. just bottles. and then watched us
in a scowl as we walked away back toward home, my brother swearing over
his shoulder at him while i trailed. i was always trailing and looking back
he cursed the way home and spat on about how some people can be
this and some people
that and don't tell mom and dad we did this
and here, carry the spade and how he should have just gone to the lake
it was too hot to dig for bottles on a day like this
i carried the spade over my shoulder for a length of the walk, then switched
it to the other side, then let it drag behind me in the dirt shoulder
while the dog day cicadas wound up in their trees and i listened
wondering about what bottles we had left unearthed in the old man's field
i look at the bottle my children gave to me
and to say what i would say would be
sentimental after all and i see the light seeing
me from the outside and i hear cicadas
