Friday, April 22, 2022

Rob Winger : Late Arrival

 

 

 

 

 

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,”

 

 

 

 

Rob Winger is the author of four books of poetry, including his latest, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant. He lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.