beginning with a line from Megan Fernandes
Every poet has a love affair with a bridge.
Mine was the Brooklyn—of course,
though it wasn’t for anyone’s ghost who floated across
then seemed to wave goodbye as they drowned.
I was in love with the drive to a cramped room
in the attic floor of a Fort Greene brownstone.
The tin ceiling shimmered with heat as we laid
naked under her bedsheets, talking, then
not, as the hours deepened. The drive to her
was always calm: after three hours on the highway,
parting Merritt Parkway’s darkness
with my headlights, I’d slide down the side
of Manhattan by midnight. Mileage mounting
on my dash—hundreds, thousands of miles
covered by a car with a flickering headlight—
I’d glance at the silhouettes of skyscrapers,
the river dotted by ships, lamps on in offices,
bedrooms rented, owned, or borrowed.
In the cool rush of the midnight
highway, I had the city to myself.
I could have pulled off FDR Drive
and rented one of those rooms. Or
I could have pulled over. I could have
sat in that darkness, my car rocking side
to side as each truck and semi hissed by.
I could have gotten out and climbed
between the diagonal beams, balanced
on the edge of the bridge and let
a sea breeze sweep my back. I listened
to the rhythmic thumping of my wheels
rocking each concrete plate as I hurtled
down the highway. I thought of us, still
breathless, lighting a joint on the windowsill
and sharing it in the dark. I watched the reflections
of the beams rise and fall across the gloss
of my hood. I glanced at the water.
Its countless, shimmering stars. I couldn’t stop
watching that famous, repeated plunge
into the river. I wanted her. Because I did,
I always will. Every poet has a love affair
with a bridge. I was in love with the drive
across mine to midnight’s other shore.
Robin’s poems have appeared in beestung, Impossible Task, Midway Journal, Poetry Online, and Quarter After Eight, among others. She studied literature and creative writing at Hampshire College and works as a substitute teacher in Holyoke, where she grew up. https://linktr.ee/arblerobin.