The bottomless hole

There was, well, is, a bottomless hole near where I grew up. Me and my brother found it one day in late summer when the grass was knee deep and we were running, paying more attention to the game we were playing then the ground we were running on. I stepped into it and had to claw my way out. I lay on my back after that shaking from a continued feeling of slipping into that blackness. My brother came over and stared down the hole; 'I can't see the bottom.' The hole nearly overtook me there. As soon as I got back I limped back with my arm over my brother like they do in the movies; I felt like a hero. After my leg healed back up we went out there again to look into the hole that nearly took my life. We stared down there, throwing pebbles down and putting our ears to the hole to listen for the sound of it hitting the bottom. That was when we put forward the hypothesis of the bottomless hole. We got more ambitious as the sumer progressed to fall. We drew up mathematical equations, figuring if we could calculate the speed of the rock and divide it, or times it (our grip on math was pretty loose) by the time it took to hear the sound we could figure out how deep it was. The only problem was no matter how quite the day was we could never hear the rocks hit the bottom. Winter put an end to our scientific enquiry; the snow covered the hole and made it a bit to dangerous to find it again. The next spring we dragged our father, the wisest man we knew, to the hole to help us figure it out. He just looked at it and shrugged, 'looks like a hole to me.' We asked him how he would go about finding the bottom. He told us to lower a rope down till it hit the bottom. A couple weeks later we grabbed the longest rope we could find and lost it down the hole to keep the rocks company. We just kept lowering it, not feeling the bottom, until it snaked it's own way through the darkness to search out the bottom for itself. Luckily Dad didn't have much need for ropes and wouldn't notice its absence for years to come. We even saved up for our own rope from our own allowances, but no matter what we did the bottom continued to be elude us. The years went by and we continued to gather around it. When things went wrong we would go and sit beside this miracle. It gave us comfort. Our lives in some ways revolved around that hole; I drank my first strong liquor there, we mourned our grandmother there, I even took girls there (I'm sure they were confused by the choice). The hole became many things to us, it was a metaphor for girls when we discovered them, a metaphor for death when our Grandma passed. It became a metaphor for everything, a metaphor for life. Even after we moved out we would come back to stand by it. After a while my brother lost his interest. He doesn't believe it's bottomless anymore; not really. We still call it the bottomless hole, but he'll smile when he says it. He doesn't come back as often now; I've maintained my pilgrimage yearly, much to the consternation of my family. Maybe someday if I make my millions I'll buy the longest cyber-optic cable in the world and lower it down with a light just to see. But then again maybe I'll leave it for some other child to find, as long as they don't fall down it.

A Bawdy Love Poem (from an oilman to his wife)

Your breasts and your thighs my dear
Your steaks and your pies my dear
are equally delicious
in their depths

Your laughter and lips
The hair between your hips
makes a welcome
that never grows cold

a working writers wish

and i write here 

on this skin of foolscap

lines crossing lines

ink and scars 

like some ill-treated notebook

watermarked and torn

so that some years on

when my tongue is gone

they can read my story

and know that I lived

constant flow

lanterns and fires on concrete banks

people turned grey and moth-like by the night and light

float like embers flowing upwards on drafts of hot air

a bridge spans the night sky in the water

people staring down at blinking stars

a river flowing over a river

the fluorescent bright banks of the river selling

everything and nothing at all

lubricating the flowing crowd with activity and alcohol

and islands of street vendors  create eddies of people

and clouds of steam smelling of the food you now want

and the light punctuates the darkness with an exclamation point

and the periods of silence interspersed with question marks of sound

all flowing like the river

that holds the activity in its breast