Finding a Dr. Swets American Beverage Bottle Empty and Whole

Finding a Dr. Swets American Beverage Bottle Empty and Whole

The tiny skeleton…

remembers the falter of engines,

a cry without

answer, the long dying

into

and out of the sea.

                                                Donald Hall

                                                The Blue Wing

I pick up scraps of glass and say they’re

beautiful.   But only if the edges are worn easy,

and forgiving them if they have a lip especially or a letter,

if (because I need an imagination for this) when I took

to the sea I’d be looking into

settling down here again in a place that claims

great heaps of people and land without partial

prejudice.  It breaks everything against the cliffs

like ships at war.  I don’t take it up,

though later I wonder, should I

have, the whole hazy with age and tumble

bottle of Dr. Swets American Beverage.  I walk out

instead into the tide where the living things

are.  I walk out into the sunrise.  I walk out

where men and women and children have

died.  Somehow though I’m never close

enough to that lighthouse no one can ever touch unless

they’re at the year’s lowest tides.  I’ve always wanted

to lay my hand against her, maybe even

my cheek.  I’ve always wanted to stay off

the shock of getting stuck out there and no way

back on foot.  She saves most people, right? The light-

house?  Those going by in their fog-choked boats,

ignoring her, though maybe that’s the whole

point.  I want to walk out far enough,

to be able to, and taste the corroded iron

and hope if it even comes close, it's what I want

or what I think I need.  I don’t know.  And I won’t

this year.  Instead, I push back at the sand and noiseless

waves and find a favored three or four sand dollars—

and somehow taking them home living and unbroken

is the only thing that matters—all that walking out

and holding my own, past the clammers and that

one antique bottle I could’ve sold for fifteen

bucks in the Clutter Shop, past the battered lobster

trap with all her catch gone out of her, past the salt

marsh the Passamaquoddy come to

when their baskets need grass (South Lubec’s the best

stretch of beach for that) past he Ferguson boy’s last

breath in the black dark, his body heaving to days

and days later… scraps of them all.  Worn by what’s struck

them, licking them clean only after they’re broke

open or left whole but hollow like the bottle, like that Hopper-

painting-sky changing behind me, like the sand dollar

dying in my inner pocket while I outwalk the tide 

that's always behind me but not that far, no, not that

far.