Clasp-locked coolers from thirty years ago
antifreeze bottles and countless packaging
of oil containers and coke bottles and milk-jug buoys
candy bar wrappers and gasoline jugs
plastic shopping bags
half buried in mud and shopping bags kicked in the wind
and more plastic bags in the trees remember
Wal-Mart and grocery stores
gas-stations and gas-stations
cigarette packs and small sleeves of plastic
tobacco tins and pouches
brown and water-logged cigarette butts fading back into the earth
pop-top beer cans filled with mud and dirt and leaves
sunk and resurfaced and pushed ashore
newer aluminum playing in the edging water
and dragged onto the muddy sand declaring
drinking preferences along one hundred miles of shore
Budweiser
Coors
High Life
Milwaukee’s Best and Budweiser
Coke and Diet Coke and Dr Pepper and Pepsi
Sprite Sierra Mist Mellow Yellow Mountain Dew
Orange Crush and Nehi and Royal Crown Cola
Life preservers and a paddle and one broken watch
one dead goose in the middle of a cypress dome
two or three small birds worn unrecognizable
blocks of Styrofoam from broken docks
from disposable coffee cups
from dirt-filled packages of night-crawlers
a broken cricket tube
and pieces of old polished bamboo
attached to some fishing line
and an empty reel of fishing line
and an empty bucket with a broken handle
and an empty lake in winter time