the dig

I cleaned out the drawer of my bedside table. Hadn’t rooted around in there for years. The accumulation went down several strata. Bookmarks, eyewear dating back to college, seven-year-old rejection notices from writing contests and literary magazines, poems folded inside wrinkled SASEs. Under an eyeglass shammy and gambler’s brochure, I found an old reporter’s notebook filled with tiny coked-up print, pages saturated with urgency and commas. Further down: ear drops, expired cold pills, Tylenol PM, a broken book light, unsharpened pencils and pens with teeth marks. Beneath that, I pulled out a pamphlet of running tips, elementary school pictures, a grainy photo from Soviet Pioneer Camp and a charcoal sketch of two pears. To my surprise, I then came upon several pot shards, a rock tool and cave drawings: a speared mastodon and a stick man rolling rocks up to a fire. That's when I saw them, from the corner of my eye, a group of dusty men and women standing around my bed in multi-pocketed vests, gripping straight-edged trowels, waiting for me to fade from memory.