The Blue Bottle

The bright blue bottle hit me like a hint of death on the breath of Spring.

I imagined it being tossed out a truck window,

by underage teens fancying themselves clever and mature and immortal,

      as if the earth had willed upon them that her stolen treasure, Aluminum,

be returned or she’d cause their truck keys disappear for all eternity.

I picked up the blue bottle,

tried to feel resurrection in a recycling sort of way,

felt instead only the hollow emptiness of mindless eternal reincarnation.

Winter had been long this year and lately I fantasized resurrection more than usual

at a field where I stopped to listen to meadowlark and field sparrow calling

for mates or alerting everyone to the sin of the blue bottle.

Several deer grazed the unseen first greens of Spring near skunk cabbage and coltsfoot.

At a small stream, I cupped my hand into the icy fast water and raised it to my lips,

then splashed my face, then splashed some more, more,

then knelt, both knees at the streambed and submersed my face and head,

in self-inflicted baptism for my own blue bottle sins,

opened my eyes, exhaled all my blue bubbles, for the longest of repentant moments.

Pulled out of the water gasping the holy Spring air for dear life

and thereafter walked each step in the garden of resurrection. ~ Girard Tournesol http://www.thewatershedjournal.org/