RELICS WITH OLD BLUE MEDICINE-TYPE BOTTLE: TO X
This old blue medicine-type bottle, unburied
From your garden last year’s the perfect centerpiece
To suit our supper—the totem-trope we need
Across this kitchen table, to show how dangerous
It is where we sit (knees near touching at times)
Dawdling and playing with our silverware,
Tapping teacups, tired and satisfied and prime
From a stint in that garden: in a few hours
We’ll find ourselves in bed, but we don’t know that now,
Do we—we’re still exchanging histories,
(It’s only my something visit to your house)
Just sorting out the portions of who, when, how—
Numbering the decades and the romances
That went bad, the faces that faded on us,
Though nothing too personal at first, just pain;
Divorces, liaisons, estrangements, fixations—
Of course our brows hurry away from hurt:
Anecdotes begun in wince end in wrinkly;
Our woeful tales go told through a mode that’s mostly
A kind of moue, comic attitude, which flirts
With grimace-smiles, jokes, the mocking of those choices,
Those great mismatings: funny how it seems of late
Both of us have been alone, celibate . . .
Collating, getting our dates right, our voices
Shed their list of affairs, entanglements, crises:
So we accord the past its poisons, and theorize
That even this old blue bottle here, stored poisons
Before we were born:—followed by suggestions
That the toxin of those heartbreaks is gone
After this long, their vitriol has fizzed out,
And we could, given an occasion, again
Consume the spirit that killed us once, if not
The letter: confessions used as cue-cards to prompt
Mutual responses of empathy or hope:
No former hemlock can harm us now—we’re immune
By now—don’t you agree—because what happens
Ripens in retrospect; each sour memory
Blossoming like the flowers you sometimes spruce
This bottle’s corroded throat with. We certainly
Are not eating much, are we, but we don’t notice—
Can’t we see how our fingers will likewise bloom
From off these knives and forks and force their field,
Interlocking like tugged-at roots . . . Untombed
Of its venom, this blue vial vigils our held
Glances. Sieved in its acid, its distilled mirror,
Would we (almost as soiled as it by time) appear
A beauty, a scarred heirloom any collector
Might stuff high on a shelf amid simulacra—
Somber still, it approbates that emptiness
We must be preparing to fill with each other—
It foretells the coiled taste, the bite unearthed
In the antiquity of a sudden, wild kiss
Whose disclosure will surprise us, as if
We have not been wholly inured by the years,
The stories we bare here across the rice, the life
Stories bittersweet, neutered, too well-rehearsed.
Will deadlier words then surface—their potency
Dis-elixired, drawn; decanted so often
That by our courteous age they’ve turned as grimy
And bunged with dust as this blue glass was when
Your shovel showed it that summer morning, and
My phrases here are (surely) just as corrupt—
What matter its sharpness, no metaphor can
Pare the ground from us as hard as we try to dig up,
To excavate feelings a bottomless need for
Soars as we toss the salad greens and pour
Dressing dripping down their fineleaved freshness
Starting to wilt already around the edges,
To rot back to that mulch they burst from. Such decay
Preserves some artifacts, if not us: they lie in
Graves contrived to obviate the skeleton
They survive beside, they strive to deny
The obvious, the crepitude fate-of-flesh bleak
Facts of our demise, obdurate bricabrac knickknacks
Laid by ancients in the coffin to propitiate
Ancestors, to aid, via these vain trinkets,
(Are we the ‘subjective correlatives’ of these
Objects, this chthonic junk the tomb-robbers missed,
Tools and talismans, amulets, a corpse-cache
Gear for ghosts, props to assist the posthumous)
Some afterworld sojourn of the soul entering
Itself, self dying to carpe diem one more day.
Refocus us on this figure, this table-centering
Blue bottle. Whose future dye indigos our day.
Dulled, we ignore these darker, gnawing warnings—
Our own skull-and-crossbone labels long since skinned—
We poke at our plates, we pat our napkins.
What antidote waits, withering, within
Against that great granulate upheaval of
Fields whose depths have grown archeological—
Filled by fucked relics and by that above-all
Most subterranean of discoveries, love?
–Bill Knott
