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
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