Bolt
Philip Booth
It’s shot all right: this bolt about
as long as a small boy’s forearm, thick
as a man’s first finger—except
for its square iron head and square nut,
the female threads frozen by rust
to the bolt itself: gorged and ridged
like a mined-out range of hills,
maybe on some peninsula
far to the North. A cold salt fog
has finally settled its dust. Its pits
are dark as marrow, the oxidized ridges
lifted gold: like ferrous tailings
the sun only recently left. God
only knows what it once held together,
what weathered away or broke up
around it: buckboard or keelson,
furnace or plow; the atmosphere
transported and fired them. Feral, now,
too crude to be more than a primitive
weapon, it’s simply itself: a bolt
cast up by tides that can’t float it;
with nothing else left, a man kneels
over it carefully, here on a shore
where the stones themselves are adrift.
how to pay attention 