Bottled World

Bottled peppers, pickles, plums, old ladies stand In small flock at the market gate Their bottled things arrayed, their pastes and jams Fruit that hung all summer fat then autumn picked Mushed and melted, now fills random jars And on collectors’ shelves in coloured glassy rows The world shrunk down to bulbs of fancy drink A gulp or two of bitter, sweet or dry Forms and labels richer in their tales told The container not the content draws the eye People stream in escalator lines Concrete-bottled, metro sausage strings Cattle crowd of elbows, faces blank Not the peacock-pretty multi-coloured things Not in winter grey and twilight coats wrapped thick Bottled pickle once a pepper crisp and bright As golden sun, and the liquor once was grape Before they locked it in the glass and corked it tight And the human flow, it runs from light to light A smile tossed, a boy waits with a rose Beneath the city-packaged layers, sudden sense of closeness, them my sea and I their drop