The novelist wrote about a painter
and the painter spoke of painting
a ship in a bottle into a painting

with two little boys. The ship in
a bottle was a metaphor. I never
thought of that before — a ship

cooped up in a bottle. I just
thought about the arduous task
of putting all those pieces to-

gether in a glass bottle. I’m
imagining with extra long
tweezers as I never have

witnessed the process. But now….
Ships aren’t meant to be sealed
up in a bottle. Messages are

meant to be sealed up in bottles
and tossed into the sea for a
voyage of many, many nautical

miles till someone finds the
bottle, opens and reads the
message. Ships in bottles just

sit on desks and go nowhere
except maybe in the mind of
a little boy or girl staring

at the ship in the bottle and
imagining that he or she is
sailing the seven seas, in

which case, I think that
might be all right, in fact
really good.