Subtitle: With links to two awesome things I read today, which were on my mind as I wrote this and must have figured in this post besides in the obvious way of me quoting them, and if you want to save yourself valuable time, skip right to the hyperlinks.
Tonight I want to cross over to something else, somewhere else, and for that I need a bridge.
You think I want a metaphorical bridge–a way, an associative link. No, no–I want a real bridge of steel and girders. Because it’s not the something else that I can’t imagine, it’s the getting there, the over and across.
But the futility of the crossing–
Here is the bridge I keep thinking of–it is sort of famous in Providence–the Seekonk River railroad bridge. The bridge that has been stuck, left to rust since 1976. If you stood against its railing as the trains used to pass, it would have also been for you like the bridge of a violin, transmitting vibrations to the body.
Still, even this bridge–maybe especially this bridge–might work for my crossing over.
Etymologically-speaking, a bridge is a beam, a log“a plank.
And then a Plank in Reason, broke, “And the Seekonk River bridge is the brokenest plank.
And when reason breaks, you might get a rose and its hips, you might get strawberry roans
And I dropped down, and down–
And hit a World, at every plunge (hyperlink, hyperlink)
Somewhere back there behind the city lights, the original idea of the word bridge wasn’t a conduit–it was more elemental–it might have begun from the Greek open sea and I step.
Tonight it will be two degrees, a temperature that should crystallize even my dimmest, most vaporous thoughts into snow“ in whatever city the future is stored.