Blue Bridge Inn

"I remember waking at the rivers
to see girders of gray sleepless bridges"

– W.S. Merwin, from "Traveling West at Night"










Even here, among the crowded seats of the Blue Bridge Inn, the roaring of jazz
pumping muscularly through the speakers at every corner,
I cannot think that it is in the circles of chattering people that I live;
the car that almost clipped the back end of my own on the way here,
flagpoles along the way, posted at front yards, spinning, wrapping,
signaling the things that the household supposedly stands for and those
things espoused by a montage of voices by the news radio in the car,
I see drift away as so much vapor by morning lifting from marsh;
and then I enter by dream, by memory, last spring bent over a thicket
on my denimed knees scratching over the cross thatched leaves,
the old and sometimes cut stems of honeysuckle trees or bittersweet,
the emerging pink lips of the dames rocket, invasives to be eradicated.
We pull. We toss to a clump. Neighors that are strangers walk about.
Down below a fresh springs bubble under a hand made boardwalk,
this was the place where the Winnebago moved among the savannah.
They walked along the creek and watched the green underwater grass
curl over the same original rocks as a water so clear as invisible,
cleanse and move on as the thoughts of the breathing buddha once did.