John Barton : WALKING BRIDGE, ST. JOHN RIVER

 

 

 

I know this span, the pace the current flows

Below its railbed, surge none sees through to
Streamlined glaze the sun and wind incises
Storm to doldrum, topaz to cobalt blue 

Tracks pulled up where on afternoons you walk
Cantilevered over capacious flood
Unloosing thought, pilings muddying torque 

Flux an inward swirling hurried forward
Regret a heavy metal, with condoms
Spent in thickets on either shore, tidal
Bore a release of salt hinting asylum 

What holds you uncontained, ache run idle

Gone the train you’d board to cross when a child
Off somewhere before, downstream, you are found.

 

 

 

 

John Barton’s books include Polari, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems, Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos, and, most recently, Lost Family: A Memoir and The Essential Derk Wynand. He lives in Victoria, B.C., where he is the city’s first male and first queer poet laureate.

Photo credit: John Preston