BRIDGE


The deer's legs draped across the flatbed
are folded over and quiver in the truck's motion.
There are too many uses for you,
the eidolon of engine knock, of dry gears, keeps telling you. You're driving a narrow bridge
that spans the water for miles.

And this use is yours.
On the horizon and catching the last daylight, balmy cells
ripen, and nightfall like drapery high above the gulf

whitens as the road becomes harder to see.
When eyes open to bantam eye
behind thunderhead, what part of the world does not look back,

what washes away? Uninhabitable and numinous city of god in a workbook,
our skyline of refineries and cranes resurfaces on the far shore,
scaffolding, ladders, the fettered
videlicets, etceteras, metal rungs ending
in smoke and fire in the ether.
Our town at the end of pain.

Or is it at pain's beginning, our breathing
while in pain, where
the thief's body is there, opened for thieves to see?
Yips and calls
attend a clear night about to cloud. What have you done
with this lifetime?
No sooner does it heal
than another white wing sweeps across water and sky.
You turn the headlights on as the ebb of insect chatter foretells the storm.

If, at pavement's end, you were asked to perform the solemnities
of prophets and schizophrenics, to light a match
inside a fish, to dig through a wall
to witness an old shame restaged, would you
stop hiding and start clawing at the plaster, certain you have heard the call?
When your eyes open

you nearly rear-end the hunter's flatbed, but you know

that what you see there in the felled buck's form so far from the wild,
you will never be able to say.