More Than Just a Container

In memory of Mark Vuono

Submitted by AB&GC reader Vince Martonis

How many old bottles have you held in your hands? Have you ever wondered whose hands have also held it since the bottle was made? What was its journey? How was it used? Was it ever displayed as a keepsake on a windowsill, passed on to a friend to keep and admire, researched by someone interested in its history?

In the poem at right, by William H. Heyen, a man goes to an auction where the belongings of a 90-year-old woman are being sold. One item he focuses on is an old bottle and how it now sort of “possesses” the woman’s identity. We, too, as collectors often remember the previous owners of the bottles we collect. We write their names on the base of the bottle or at least place their names in our brains, believing that the person’s identity is important because of the simple reality that the person held it, displayed it, studied it, cherished it, shared it with others, and protected it. We understand and honor that attachment.

The poet, William Helmuth Heyen (born November 1, 1940), is an American poet, editor, and literary critic. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Suffolk County. He received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Brockport and earned a doctorate in English from Ohio University in 1967. He taught American literature and creative writing at SUNY–Brockport for over thirty years before retiring in 2000.

His work has been published in numerous literary journals and periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Ontario Review, Harper’s, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Southern Review, as well as numerous online publications. The Carrie White Auction at Brockport, May 1974 We sit under the tall trees to wait. The old woman—we didn’t know her—her life is lined up across the grass. These things whisper.

Waking early some mornings we hear the bells of the bridge of the old barge canal that brought this town, board by board, and dime by dime. Maybe down the road there is talk, held low as we listen, heard as though from the other world.

We know so much we never have to think of. A dozen miles north, just as it did when Carrie was a girl, the great lake laps shore. Storybook clouds sweep south, white against blue sky.

The auctioneer holds up a mirror: we are together now; we see ourselves in poses only the light will always remember. The trees disappear in a burst of glare . . . .

In the glass of her hand-blown bottle, another century’s air is caught in bubbles. The bottle casts a blue-white shadow, now, on our table,

so perfect, so still. She was ninety years old, and lived here, only here, only here. Trees, grass, sun, the rushing sky, and an old woman we never knew.

There has not yet been an ending to this, unless it is not true that some intention of her eyes is still held in the bottle’s blue (she must have looked at it so often), something of her touch in its wavy glass (she must have held it so often).

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