Last week I had the privilege of attending "Envisioning a Livable Mayo Bridge," a symposium focused on creating a community-informed design process for the soon-to-be-replaced Mayo Bridge connecting Manchester to Shockoe Bottom. This heavily trafficked historic bridge spans the iconic James River and links the city's Downtown and Southside districts. It was amazing to see the confluence of people engaged and invested enough to come out on a Monday night to have a say in the future of this RVA infrastructure, which will literally shape this part of the city in years and decades (and maybe centuries?) to come.   

It got me thinking about the importance of bridges, literal and literary. Poems are bridges, of course, spanning perspectives and worldviews. And as a poet who happens to live by the James River, I realize bridges, both actual and metaphoric, figure a lot in to my work. A quick search of my hard drive (with work going back over a decade) found 18 poems, to be exact, in which bridges feature prominently. For this month's draft experiment, I decided to try to bridge my bridge poems. The result is a sort of cento, a collage poem (generally created by tying together lines from different poets), here tying together lines from diverse pieces on a single theme. 

Let me know what you think!    

PS--If you're in RVA and interested in having input into what the next Mayo Bridge should be like, please go check out the VDOT survey available through June 9!  

To the woman with a gun [&] the singer with the cyanide eyes


There is a Hebrew saying that means: the world is a narrow bridge;
the most important thing, not to be afraid.

No one else has ever told me
they wanted to die with me.

It felt like something to hold on to
(like a wedding ring tossed into the blue

of the Chesapeake Bay, once)
something to drown with,

something to drown for.
Remember when we could just

hop on the back of a bike like
it was nothing, go racing down

Dock to the park by the old shiplocks,
like nothing, no—

I know.

I want
that song caught between

whistles, about running
till your sides stitch up,

about two riverbank lovers
still on the edge

of something.

Slowed

to this

instant, this precise

angle of gleaming sun

and asphalt

and sticky mid-

river June

where you arrived at the cement balustrade of…
Wonder if when I reach its length, I will still find you waiting.

There are things you tell no one, lines
written in the dark
with the language of the lost.

The march of dandelion clocks ticks onward, dug-in: six months, some-
odd days and twenty-seven seconds. Slow mornings in chains of summer hunger.

There are feathers like dandelions caught
in the weave of the bedsheets, the cracks

behind the stove. I fish them
with a toothpick to twist into a rope

that I will tie around your waist, haul
you back when time stops.

Boxsprings like poems have to say
something—

Who,
after all, will post bail for you at midnight under a fattening moon?

Uncertain
when it happened, how it happened, just suddenly

like a bridge road seen from the air as it goes
into a tunnel: there

and then not, suddenly
you have the weight of a tanker over you.

Remember what they said,
just before you went under.

Remember our days on the rocks by the river,

something we carry around in the pit of us,

the finger that points inward, or maybe,

if the whiskey makes us generous, the faraway in our eyes

left
to navigate the currents,

the white spaces,
the breaths between,

this is as balanced as I’ve been, I say, just on the edge of a mountain I could paint you blind by its toe-holds. There’s your daily father son holy ghost. To a soundtrack of Satriani cruising down the turnpike

by the end of the night.
With its pockets

full up with stars,
a waxing moon sets on water

silent save the murmur
of stone; a train ghosts in

hauling coal somewhere south;
[like] when the circus trucks

pull out of town—
it’s raining then, too,

falling light as touch on slick ribbed asphalt, god
filling each unseen pothole, tigers’ eyes wide to catch the drops through barred windows.

What longing must lie in the silence, watching a sky that promises promise, god in each patter on the windshield

answering some tiger-cry deep in the belly
of the trucks
and the river
and the night.

They both feel a little less
alone.

Careful not to drip whiskey truth like sour honey on the floor of the downtown lockup
as we back into the jungled night. Earnestly: don’t believe her; she knows this bridge-

work in the dark. the birds outside the courthouse are terrible joyous for one ay-em. Jailbirds. We laugh. There might be one mis-truth in this,
but I haven’t found yet which it is.