One Brilliant New Poem by Bruce Morton

 

Anecdote of the Bottle

     (with deference to Wallace Stevens)

 

 

Someone placed a bottle we see.

Obvious it is, on the hillside.

It bids the dwindling wilderness

To conceal it on that hill.

 

The wilderness approaches up to it,

Scrawled around it, hardly wild.

That bottle is now flat upon pine

Needles small on the ground.

 

Yet, it takes durable dominion

This plastic bottle, bare and opaque.

One need not be a seer to care

That it is like nothing else there.

Bruce Morton splits his time between Montana and Arizona. His poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Muddy River Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Halfway Down the Stairs, Ibbetson Street, and San Pedro River Review. He was formerly Dean of Libraries at Montana State University.