Roo Borson

…

I followed the path into the woods, and just as my friend described, it led across the old railway bridge. The water beneath the bridge was wide and deep and not particularly clear. It seemed to swell as it flowed, as if pushing something unseen downriver. Indeed a large dredging barge was planed in the midst of the river, doing its unseen work. At one point along the right-hand side of the bridge was a bronze plaque, along with three poems and some plastic flowers tacked to the wooden railing. A boy had jumped to his death here some time ago it seemed, and the poems – one by his parents – were there not only to mark the loss, but also as a means of speaking with him directly. The poems, expressed in commonplaces, were not fine art, but they were communication. They were the sort of poems that say what they mean. Amazingly, almost superstitiously, people still fall back on writing poetry when they feel they have something truly important to communicate.

…

I understand the parents’ wish, despite everything, to speak to their son, though if it were up to me I’d take the poems and flowers down. Yet I too would like to place a poem on the bridge for those who’ve gone under, as well as those of us who’ve stayed above.

On the last night of the year

the swans set sail at evening.

Then among the boats and fireworks

we can see the black water,

the city in the river.

That’s where all our life is,

beyond the grief and failure,

the wake among the reeds.

Down there

down there

what is that place now

but a hill studded with lights

and a pine tree that doesn’t move with the wind?

Wherever there is summer,

wherever the crickets sing to it,

that place is.

But longing is a wind that blows through you,

and like the pine that is nowhere

you do not move.

As for you, world –

you’ll have become small, and round, and lavender-coloured: ode

to the ewer, the comb, the water cooler.

And you? You lived in a place which was once a town,

you’ve seen it on maps before, others loaded ships

as in a dream: mood, appetite, memory, learning –

the demands seemed endless, all marsh-lights and loveliness,

the final estimates for the real world

or these propositions, for instance, which are sometimes true.

Indeed such unconscious concentration is possible,

in the neon light of early spring

and later, those evenings no longer fully spring

yet not quite summer either,

when the scent pulls back into the flower

and blackbirds bathe among violets,

half aspect, half unreal, in the slow rain of leaves.

Day after day, some days not returning,

and the boughs painted with light green lichen,

the detailed pink of the flowering apricot –

don’t go there unless to banish yourself,

because you are banished, beech,

oak, birch, and yew, among the hazel woods

of the elder world, where feathers flash

among the branches and hide in the darkening varnish

and history becomes the history of bad ideas,

a gloom of rotten nuts and nut-skins,

bitter paper. And tonight

the half-light in which paper glows –

walls, porticos, arches, places (who lived there?),

the print invisible, and the ocean sounding

all night long, clavicle to vena cava,

clavicle to vena cava,

it’s not a description.