replaced
the one
bulb planes see on that bridge he tells us,
bark sizzling into white fingerprints for the wind.
in
this guitar
spring everything’s wet, wrapped in coiled steel
and someone plucks low notes from the cold enveloping our bodies.
a
bridge named
after the first guy to die in the war. we’d ask
which war but the article tells us quietly which one.
we
don’t
understand it, how one word implies a noun
so we and the fire smoke and the wind channels a compass made
of
smoke. the
smoke revises our seating chart and directs us
everywhere except where it points. over the river
in a
canvas
chrysalis inching backward the bridge grows slowly
bluer. to get to this fire you drive under rust being erased
by a
thousand
under-paid brushes. the first guy to die
who didn’t build the bridge jumped off it. there’s no small
word
that
implies
swan dive, gainer, corkscrew, how, into what
style he turned his fall, but we don’t ask. we rotate chairs,
talk
about the
50 tons of paint that every seven years keep
the Eiffel tower free of scabs. my sisters don’t say it
but
they prefer
the rust. one man died in the construction of the Eiffel tower.
we don’t want to know how, we prefer imagination,
a
rivet-gun
tragedy, a loose-strut arpeggio, a harness uncoupling
into a sustained decrescendo. first guy, he jumped, didn’t work
on it,
was
the nephew
of the bridge’s namesake, and we nod that coincidence
is silent. no man does the work to use it as an end. those filaments,
they’re
enormous, big as his forearm he tells us, smoke rolling around him
like a lock tumbler. imagine, a man crouched in the sky above a river
fastening
a bulb
into its socket. imagine that bulb burning in water
better than any fire a man can make with his hands.
This
poem came out of a conversation around a fire outside a family
friend’s cabin.I see this family friend every summer and his
stories range far, from being stranded in the Yukon to BUDs
training at 50 to poaching lobster off the Elizabeths. But we
don’t love him just for his stories. And that’s what this
poem is centrally concerned with: the connection of legacy and
production/creation. Whatever we create ought to last longer than
we do, and though it won’t remember us, its
witnesses/readers will. And whenever I see that enormous bulb at the
end of the poem blinking on the Braga Bridge, I think of Auntie Buck. |