Time's trove.

The warm air rising on this mountain has an awesome yowl.
Exhalations in a sort of undulating organ moan,
Deep and shaking the liquids of the stomach vertical.

Under the mealy earth black as black and smelling of rot at its highest peak
there are secrets in a cardboard shoe box, size 10.
The stone of a peach and a baby's blue eye.

The last cologne you swore you'd ever wear.  A yellow bottle with frosty white lovebirds caught in each other.
And this tooth you lost.

Papers of yellow with a dark inky blemish
words traced by careful thought, tripping between lines of red or blue.
A thin gold ring. Pencils before lead could kill you.

Drying purple daises struck dead between sheets of Lowell poetry.
A blown-in lightbulb from your last night at the lakehouse, scratched transparent.
The cigarette he slipped you in the dark. Hadn't ever the heart to tell him your grandfather died of lung cancer.

A poorly painted baby Jesus stolen from the church's nativity scene on the Christmas you turned seven.
A popscicle stick stained with the remnants of sticky sweet writings.
The stub of every ticket for three summers before your best friend moved to Kansas.

Green sea glass and inner scrapings of opal oyster shells.
Lint and pieces of grass and dirty stones shaped like romantic hearts or robin eggs.
Plaster cleaned from your shoe the day we ran by the house you grew up in, or what was left of its pink insulation and wooden splintered skeleton.

The faint smell of chocolate smeared on the corner of Adam Burton's valentine but you don't like the intensity of chocolate, or the way it melts before you can taste it.
The sounds and tasting of the summer you lost your mother's one red glove in the woods of birch,
papery and bent with invisible boyswinging.

Rocking back on the damp wormy earth, a coward
and stubbonly pack-ratting loss and hope and broken car fuses.
No season of time in a box or bottle of perfumed liquid.

The gradual slipping. Casually from between webbing of fingers and toes,
like fine quartz shavings;
slowly, surely, indefinitely.