Steve,
I’ve been reading your collected Selected,
earmarking
its final pages for a next exchange
–
a party hat, sure, but also the next tower
on
the bridge, without cables just yet,
holding
space across this water between us.
Why
do you wait till the waiting fills years
you
ask, here, on this page written the year
we
might first have met. Why will you stall till
the
stalling’s your life? Online, all my feeds
are
hungry with love notes, mixed tapes,
festival
lineup chit-chat, craggy outcrops and
dog-filled
mountain meadows, serious hula hoops
and
basement hecklers, a kid’s constellations,
your
bottle still sitting on the staircase down. It’s only
now
I see the all the gravestones between your covers.
I’d
like to ask your thoughts on all these bridges,
Steve.
But only the central girders, the primary
roadways
with their cable-stayed towers, only
the
ends of the cantilever levelling, only these
have
yet been built across this water.
In
your second-to-last email, you said, it seemed
to
you, we were uncannily similar men, so Chapeau
bas, you typed. If
only. The new Champlain bridge,
I
see, was built in independent sections, too, only later
linked
with a clear roadway that looked like earth.
It’s
fix yourself now or always be broken you said.
So
you’re still holding, I think, that whiskey glass
or
some Martin’s slender neck. You’re still offering
your
winter coat to some freezing stranger. You’re
listening
to another final speaker’s ancient closing tongue.
The
bridge, then: not just a poem, but a poem written
with
care across water. Not just a pointing towards the far
shore,
but a way across this rushing gorge, less snow
globe
than astral plane. Let’s catch that new thermal the next
time
you’re standing here, okay? We’ll ride it all the way across.
for Steven Heighton (1961-2022), with three lines from his “Gravesong,”
