I went back to the place, the place where, as a child I buried a yellow snake in a blue jar.

I was ten or eleven I think; it was Wednesday afternoon after gray rain.  My father, in his usual black, helped me dig the grave.

The ground is still, as it was then, dark, loamy, smelling of leaves, bark sap and forest water.

The marker made with young sadness and placed with care had become part of the smell, still wet with the perfume of living things in the dead part of the wheel.

I dug the ***, not blue, now the color of earth which, in the end, swallows even glass made with fire.

I cut my finger as I opened the jar. A single bright red drop sparkled in the afternoon sun as it fell toward the rich tan dirt.

The fresh red landed on the always open snake eye, and reflected clouds.  

The red eye watched as I turned the open jar in the afternoon sun. He was, for an instant, as he was when I left him there and topped the ground with my own salty water.

I remembered how he looked, perfect, golden and coiled against blue, his bones now melted to white sticks with his new blood eye to the sun.

I gifted the open earth with his bones, my blood, drew deeply on smell of the ancient wet Wednesday I put him there, and left him to rest with my father.