In her journal, one of my students wrote that question, having found it in a self-help book her mom had read over and over. I think I'll run that question by a certain group of poets I'm looking forward to working with.
For me, it's an abandoned hump-backed concrete job like the old Borden bridge, although the other day I was dazzled by that 30s-era bridge over the rail yard in Moose Jaw that set my Loco Log meter all a-whirl. But these are just first crossings. What my bridge looks like depends on what it's over, where it leads, what it sounds like under my wheels. Maybe that black iron bolt-and-girder beauty just down from the Stegner House in Eastend, where I perched and watched the beavers. Maybe that river between Kupiano and Moresby in Papua New Guinea, '79 or so, that we could drive through when it was low, get stuck in after a rain, have to spend hours waiting for when it was running too high--until they built a bridge there after I'd left.
So what does your bridge look like, my friends.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
A small wooden structure--with boards popping up--that ran over the muddy "backwater" just south of my hometown of Meadow Lake.
As a girl and then a teen, I snownmobiled under it, canoed under it, biked over it, and sat on the dirt banks beside it, pitching stones into the backwater and contemplating what my life might become.
Perhaps there was fishing, too. Perhaps there was kissing.
Does it still exist? I don't know. Did it ever exist? As much as anything in memory ever does.
It was a little a bridge, and a long time ago.
Answers: yes and maybe. Thanks, Shelley.
I don't have one. It's flat where I live.
Post a Comment