Bridge Vision
Carolyn Guinzio
It is undone by rot, over a creek in knots of twigs
unhooked and crooked in roots that sink into its edge:
the bridge between your being here and not. Under
a sky that drops or does not drop a cold blue rain,
figure in green-grey oaks half-lit or lit in mist unbowed
by bows of rain that fight off sun, as if the sun dissolves
the shade instead of making shade where nothing was.
A curtain blue in blue shade hangs between a wafting
curl, a set of bones in smoke and rain. In darkness,
we can fool ourselves. A shadow dissipates in light,
becomes a shade, an undulating plume of gray, and that
is you. A rotting bridge is all that stands between
the flesh becoming smoke, dissolving back into a sky
that hangs upon the living standing on the dead.
Carolyn Guinzio’s new collection, A Vertigo Book, won the Tenth Gate Poetry Prize and will appear later this year. Carolyn Guinzio is online at CarolynGuinzio.tumblr.com.