Queens Borough Bridge
Sean Sutherland Remember how plentiful they seemed; the flounder we fished for with string we wound around the crook of our finger? We could feel their breath pulse first in the line before the pull. The sun high, the ocean so still until we’d hear the lap of waves along the boat again. Then some wind would cut through the salty iodine air carrying the earthy fume of oak; and it was fall sending us notice. Then we would enter the long drift of hours where a bell rang and became years. Two nights ago I walked the long span of the Queensborough Bridge attempting to lengthen the day asking the sort of questions that begin with why and get no answers, just the sound of traffic under towering arches. Down below, at the edge of the East River with its coiled eddies, in the sheen of park light, I saw a boy and a girl climb an industrial fence, he with a pole, she with a net made from shirt hanger and panty hose. These two, who could have easily been falling asleep on some rooftop somewhere, were wresting from the day as much as they could. Up the river above us, snouting through pools of light, a black bristle of wind ran down river headed for a different ocean than the one where you and I with a boat and some string drifted, astonished. The city asleep, I watched them, these two small figures, as if from a future which didn’t include me. Grand Street Bridge, Newtown Creek Queens Lost in a neighborhood of Queens I pass a small bridge keeper’s house. In the slender window a hand holds a glass coffee pot as someone readies himself for a long shift and the red draw bridge light floats on the black canal water below. Down the other side of the bridge I enter the past; an old granite bridge out to sea in Maine. It’s arched back surfaces under an ocean night sky higher than time. A cloud sails past like a Spanish galleon suffused with light, and the full moon casts our five young faces in milk blue. If someone were to cough in Spain, across the great glass calm, we would hear it. The stars like small children have come close to sit low on the horizon, because they have heard we are going to go where they can not go; into the sway of seaweed with its dark channel. The height discovered in our yells is silenced as something comes rushing up from the bottom to wrap our feet in cold. Surfacing, our tongues taste like the clear mineral brine of an oyster, and from above we spot the green phosphorescent swarm on each of our shoulders. Then we stand, dry and calm as the black pines have drunk even the faint ticking of our heartbeats, to look out at the long bend of the sea. Was there a voice about to speak? One that could tell us that we are already here apart of this milky blue white silence? Only the sound of gears pulled down four miles up the island as the drunk we all know puts his truck into first up the hill, heading for Halifax with a few hundred pounds of lobster at three am. His break lights flash, a little forest fire, and they’re gone with all the years since, as I walk past a junkyard. The steel frame of a car window shines at me That drunk is buried under a tree now That cloud became morning rain. Triborough Bridge While sitting on the benches in Astoria Park, the whitecaps of the east river led my eye on to Manhattan skyline, while I ate home made gorp with lint in my pockets. I thought I knew what freedom was, and maybe it was summer, this, fifteen years ago, with the hum of the Triborough Bridge overhead; I would see it from her bedroom window and she would see it from mine, six blocks away like that Lucinda Williams song. Her skin as white as china with little black moles spread across her chest that twinkled like a coda to a long city walk, as dusk brought on the bridge lights and her recitations of old Italian poets. Her love was like Victor’s explanation of watching baseball in the boogie down Bronx. The way someone would take the face plate off a street lamp and connect an old TV, and the way someone’s grandmother made Mofungo and would hand you silverware rolled in a napkin, and the way someone pulls an empty chair next to them and motions for you to have a seat; “lets watch this game together”, even though I don’t know you, which is what her small son seems to say with her eyes and her mouth coming towards me not caring who I’m, out of a distant city that sparkles on water, out of a photo that arrived in the mail yesterday. |
About the author:
Sean Sutherland is originally from Maine and is currently studying with the poet Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio in New York City. His poems have appeared in the literary magazines Prick of the Spindle and will appear in the upcoming Spring 2015 issue of Blast Furnace. He is the director of the reading series Verbal Supply Company in Brooklyn, NY. He is also a MacDowell Colony fellow, and has had plays of his produced in Maine, New York City, and Los Angeles. |
