Decalcomania with River and Bridge

by Ruth Towne

Image credit: Yang Liu on Unsplash

Over the railing of the bridge

below me but not so far, a river

disintegrates, it comes to an end

of sorts, it throws itself over,

over, into the ravine of serrate rocks,

irregular teeth at the river’s mouth.

Once, my husband demonstrates

how little it takes as we visit.

We stand together at the edge looking

below. I am warm in the summer sun.

Vapor takes shape in the air after a storm.

I listen as he explains, I am still as water,

tranquil, as if on each of my daily visits

as I walk the road beside this river

I don’t consider going over,

which he doesn’t know.

Water releases water as drops,

body releases body as thought–

misting up, sinking down, in the air,

on the rocks. Water, body separate,

are separate, come together again. 

I have wondered over this edge

of water times before. Once, I am five

inside the glossy shell of a green canoe

when I ride over inside my mind.

I try to stop then. A horizontal board

out of view makes that water’s edge,

a boundary somewhere under the water

for the water’s surface to sublimate,

to suppress. Bless the board, it holds me

from going over, however invisibly.

Here, the rail is thigh-high, perpendicular,

green as liberty, as the old canoe I keep

in my mind. All this–the bridge, the river

below the bridge, the cliff below the river

–all this waits for me. All this passes

a vacant mill graying, deteriorating.

That building lists toward water’s edge.

It does not remember what it was like

when its turbines first turned. But the river

remembers how it surged before the dam.

I am behind the rail at the bridge’s edge.

As is its habit, the bridge keeps practiced

in the air. As is my tendency, I visit here

to look at the river decomposing below.

So this is how I see myself going over:

first the bridge rail, head heavy, thoughtless

then thoughts lost in the air. In the air–

I hang there as long as possible,

suspended, pendant and pendent.

Since the bridge is not so high,

there is hardly time for me

to digress, to wonder between edge

of bridge and edge of water at the quiet

while the river lulls by, a music box

unwinding in dead air. For an instant

Image credit: Mark Thompson on Unsplash

I am below the river below the bridge

as water catches me. It deadens

my fall. Then I float again, face to the base

of the bridge, flat on my back, in the black

and turbid current, feeling first

since I hung there in the air

the changed way my body makes sense

of the water, how I can sense more

than temperature and pressure there,

how my body does not guess at sensation.

I feel what someone always ought to feel,

what the water ought to feel like now,

how water always was without me.

So afloat and knowing what going over

is like, then I could find the river’s edge

and climb out of the water,

and back to my senses again,

or maybe

I could stay floating almost over,

or not.

Of course, there are other bridges to go

over. I am ten when I come to know

a strange chain-weighted bridge

by its name, Memorial. Before this,

I name each bridge by its unique

feature or shape: Pillar, Mill, Metal Grate,

Four-Square, and Dinosaur, that high

and ancient frame scaled patina-green

and towering over the river-harbor’s mouth.

Then, at seventeen, I am driving over

that dinosaur, when I consider

pure distance–

White Mountains bounding the west,

Atlantic constraining in the east,

all that water and air beneath me,

and I think to myself, Hold tight. Hold tight.

Here, not far off from bridge and river,

maples and pine trees cling to the riverside

as the river erodes rocks and boulders

leftover from ancient glaciers.

This landscape lives while I do.

It changes. It decays.

I have carried the image of the river

and the bridge with me all my life.

And I remember what it is like

with my father behind me

in the green canoe at the edge,

how surely the current will take us away,

how despite my crying he goes forward

pressing his oar toward the empty place

where the water falls

because it cannot go.

He keeps rowing.

Bless him, he keeps rowing.

Below me, the river deteriorates

the day my husband demonstrates going

where the bridge rail splits,

where the two sides of the bridge seam.

He slides easily, rainwater in a stream

between those pillars. He holds himself over

for an instant. And he considers it,

the plunge under into wet leaves and rotten

waterlogged branches in silt and mud.

When he returns from his odyssey

between the beams, he explains to me

what held him inside,

this expansion joint, a design

for the bridge to breathe.

Then he points below the other side

of the rail. He shows me the concrete

Image credit: Adam Jang on Unsplash

pillar of the bridge to which he swims,

his point of return in the current.

It’s my turn, so I point to a tiny horizon,

where the water falls

over the dam’s wood ledge,

where beside, a ladder rises

at the last moment

as I am back at the bridge

and the river, eye to the mist

as it rises up, sunk close to under

the water as it throws itself over,

where I am so close to going.

Bless it. Bess this river. Bless this bridge.

Bless this way of living as I go.

***

Ruth Towne

Ruth Towne is an emerging poet. She is the Stonecoast Review’s Co-Editor of Poetry for Issue 21. Other poems from her project Resurrection of the Mannequins have been published by The Lily Poetry Review, Decadent Review, New Feathers Anthology, Coffin Bell Journal, Arboreal Literary Magazine, and Anodyne Magazine.