We were told to keep
An eye on the ground –
I pictured one of my eyes
Rolling along the ground,
Covered in dirt and chaff.
Harold Albright had found
A whole shoebox full –
His hogs rooted them up.
We didn’t have hogs,
But every spring we walked
In the wake of the plow,
One eye on the ground,
The other in the skull.
That land was limestone.
The shares broke it up
Into likely shards.
It was easy to fool oneself
Into believing that
One had found one,
But they were missing
The telltale divots,
The fishlike shape.
We pocketed them anyway,
The points pressing through
The mesh athletic shorts
We wore all summer,
Showed them to tired men
Who shrugged.
Maybe.
I wasn’t so much
Looking for arrowheads
As for proof that
Someone had been there
Before me.
To touch what they had
Would be to collapse time
And touch their hands.
But obsessed with finding
What they had made,
I didn’t think about
What they had lost.
Beautiful!