-
Parable of the Ancient Greek Urn
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
42 Parable of the Ancient Greek Urn An ancient Greek urn swollen with barnacles, pulled from the sand’s suck. for centuries the sea clothed the clay with seashells. Who could imagine this urn would surface on the other side of time, grotesque and beautiful? i rinse it in the surf, buff it with a beach towel, hoping perhaps the past will spill like a genie from this long-stemmed neck and delicate lip. Alexis shouts and lobs rocks at a bobbing water bottle, gashing its plastic belly so it folds beneath a wave and sinks through a world suspended—blue cool dream where clear plastic bags slip like jellyfish. Perhaps in a hundred years a boy will dive here and pick through food tins bearded with seaweed, empty as hunger. When he shoots to the surface, his fingers will grasp the neck of what used to be our water bottle. Will he open it hoping to find a note inside, or does he take the bottle as the message? He’ll wipe it off, guess the brand name, then toss the bottle back, bad catch, into the ocean of discarded things. What good is it to make these stories up? The bottle rolls on the ocean floor or slips into a fisher’s net with a catch of tuna. And i still come back to this urn, pocked with the dried body cavities of molluscs whose names i could never guess: limpet, sea butterfly, nudibranch, chiton. Dead now. Scoured with salt and sun, their white bone ears hear nothing. Their thousand mouths are open. Karavi Beach, Serifos, Greece ...