Jason Christie : Bridge and Burn

 

 

The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.

– Martin Heidegger

 

I wrote Bridge and Burn because we had this old tree in our front yard that was nearly dead. It is too kind to say it was dying. The city kept telling us they wanted to get more time out of their asset (gross), and we kept telling them that giant pieces of bark were falling off and landing on our car (yikes). We figured it was only a matter of time until a piece fell on someone. The tree was full of ants (gross). It was like an ant superhighway. They hollowed out the trunk and travelled along the branches to drop onto our roof and get into our home through whatever cracks they could find (yikes). It was a beautiful, big tree but it had to go. Finally, the city cut it down and left behind a giant stump (gross). I wanted to honour the tree and play with the idea of an object animated by the drives and desires of something alien, as alien to a tree as an ant might be. Trees can't travel and ants are defined by their mass locomotion, almost like particles or bits of information (yikes).

So, I was scratching around for a way to write about the tree, and I was in Portland at one of my favourite coffee shops, when across the street I saw a store called Bridge & Burn. I jotted that down as the title for the poem and then set about writing it. I kept getting distracted by messages, online ads, people sharing videos, etc. (gross), and I wanted to capture some of that in the poem as well (yikes). The streamers and video content producers of our time are the pathetic obverse of poets: they demand, cajole, manipulate, beg for attention because they are directly compensated for whatever amount of our time they can accumulate for their various platforms (gross). In that mode, I beseech thee to smasheth that like button, order some of above/ground's chapbooks, subscribe to the press, buy my books, talk about me online, please pay money for poetry (yikes)! It's all gotten to be too much.

 

 

 

 

Jason Christie lives and writes in Ottawa. He is the author of Canada Post (Invisible), i-ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and Cursed Objects (Coach House). His most recent chapbooks are: Bridge and Burn (above/ground) and Heavy Metal Litany (Model press). He is looking for a home for a new manuscript of poetry he wrote with the help of several Python scripts.