Marilyn McCabe

Marilyn McCabe's poetry has won awards and contests through AROHO, The Word Works, Grayson Books, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her books of poems include Perpetual Motion and Glass Factory, and chapbooks Rugged Means of Grace and, most recently, Being Many Seeds, available at Grayson Books. Poems and videopoetry have been published in print and online. Marilyn blogs about writing and reading at Owrite.

Petit Pont

Almost flight, suspended, water moving under, not here, not there, neither coming nor going, at a stasis, a crossing, at a centerpoint, history passing under, the detritus of the day, the day, the dead, the market, old poisons, fallen things.

If I spread out my arms, they are a bridge. Is my body a river? My head falls over the arc of shadow, splinters into light.

To the boatman below I'm on the edge. If I pull back, I disappear. 

The boatman waves until the bridge swallows him. Will he come out the other side, or disappear forever inside the bridge that is my body and its murky memory caverns? I never see him again.

If my husband stands next to me on the bridge our elbows would touch, an arc of touch, synapses snap to the skin's quick response, an exchange of energy, warm. But each one's bridge is a different bridge. Different river. Different point of departure, return. He would wonder at an unfamiliar dome while I watched a boat of white-clad people dancing. 

If we share what we see, our world is wider. If not, we are alone on the bridge. But we are all alone on the bridge.

If a bridge fails you, you may become an island. 

River unceasing. Fed and fed, it never rests. The bridge too. It never stops reaching the ends, never stops hovering over the water, heaving slightly toward the clouds.

I am moving; the river is still.

Drought makes a bridge disposable; flood disposes of it. 

You cannot cross a bridge. It is the river that is crossed. No more than you can cross a life. You pace it, waking every day to a new set of steps and stumbles. My mother shuffles into her sneakers, grasps her walker, heaves up to discover how long the hours are that river toward night.

It occurs to me that as I see on the bridge, I am seen. How much of what I do is toward that desire? A reach, span, a draw is what I do. If my acts build a bridge, you are the river.

You are the bridge. I am the river reaching reaching but rushing past. I can't stop leaving.

Some come to the bridge as a way down. They have crossed the river but the other side was just the same. The bridge to no where. A bird launched from a bridge lifts up. A man finds another way. In this way a bridge is a point not a line. Man falls the same rate as feather?

I can see upriver and down, and up both the streets that lead to the bridge. I am the focal point of all these other places to be. So I'm nowhere. Now here. Which way should I go?

A folktale says once upon a time death arrived and split the oneness into world and the afterlife. The people prayed to God to bring the two together, so God breathed on the earth to create a bridge. Did they want to die? Or can the dead come back now, dancing down God's breath?

The bridge is in the water. A cloud crosses the bridge. In this way, I am united with sky, as there I am: in it. Small cloud frowning. Bird on my head. 

As long as I am on the bridge, I do not have to be one sided. I am larger than that on the bridge. As long as I am on the bridge, I do not have to either age, nor act young for my years. I am just right. My skirt is not too short. My hair is not too matronly. Neither have I promise, nor have I betrayed my promise. On the bridge there is no need for ambition. No one fails the bridge, which has no expectations. The bridge does not care if you cross it or not. The bridge does not care if I curl up here as the night settles over us.

To stand on a bridge is a kind of rebellion. Pulled onward to the next bank beyond from where I began, the force of ongoing is almost irresistible. To stand on a bridge is to rethink momentum. Life becomes dimensional here at the crossroads of road and river, balanced between water and sky. I have an opportunity to resettle. I could, it seems, rise up.

Or is it a lack of courage that keeps me here, not there or there, keeps me suspended, as others move back and forth and the river on? I don't think so. I feel it would be easier to hurry onward with the tide of people, or leap into the river's progress than to withstand those forces, to create a small eddy here in the center, where thought can circle as a leaf.

This span is humanmade, structured, erected bit by bit, reach by reach, until the river is forded by concrete. Some man's hands held these pieces. This is someone's idea turned dimensional, whereas I am haphazard and chancy, a torque of muddled DNA. I stand on a thought thing, a calculation of which my weight is part. The bridge needs me.

Travel is a motion, even at a standstill. By definition you, traveler, have come from away and will go, as the bridge fully arrives. Night has come (will go) while I have stood here, dropping in shards into the river. In this way, bridge, river, night, you, and I are the same, ever in transit. Bright dart.

A bridge is a line connecting two points. A line cannot exist without its points. Two points demand a line. Align, no matter how much they try to ignore each other. Connect the dots: a bridge appears. But the bridge itself is unfamiliar. The bridge itself is unknown. Your first step off the known world takes you onto the bridge.