The word
bottle led me to think about cellar holes.
Rambles in the woods in New England can often mean coming upon a sunken patch, with what looks like a stone wall around part of it. It's fairly regular in shape, and always has a lilac bravely holding on, somewhere nearby, even as the forest closes in. When I was a child, we found some of these in the Vermont forests around where we lived during part of the year. There are old roads, tracks, logging roads to explore. Going deep. Sometimes alone. Smell the moss, swim in the sunless green. Cracking twig just off to the left. A deer? or a bear . . .
Just off to the left again. There. The place where a house once stood. Then you start to root around. The dump is never very far from the back door. You find a cup handle, a broken plate. A spoon! But always bottles. Patent medicine usually. The turquoise faded. Or brown. sometimes clear. An intact one a prize.
New Hampshire
–Donald Hall
A bear sleeps in a cellar hole; pine needles
heap over a granite doorstep; a well brims
with acorns and the broken leaves of an oak
which grew where an anvil rusted in a forge.
Inside an anvil, inside a bear, inside a leaf,
a bark of rust grows on the tree of a gas pump;
EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow
cellars of diners; a wildcat waits for deer
on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost
starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees
meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane
