Field Guide to a Figured World.

Field Guide to a Figured World

The bridge is out, a woman tells me. I query: 

did you walk across it anyway? No, she says,

she didn’t try it. The bridge is out, I’ve been told

this now for years, but still I’ve walked across it,

leaned, even, against its railings to look 

into the water rushing down a decline, as all

rivers do, or they wouldn’t be rivers at all.

Looking at the barn swallows, hieing 

themselves from the water into the cross-

currents, playing the drift, in what seems

from here, the bridge’s edge, a kind 

of idling, purposeless, all their gleanings invisible. 

The air is thick with what they seek, and 

the cloudy world of blue and mist and gathered

rain potent and withheld. I inspect the bridge,

its seven spans, with care, its closure announced 

in definite terms: DANGER: but also provisional: 

the sign’s enclosed in a plastic sleeve, like 

an assignment turned in for grading, before paper 

turned obsolete. They’ve propped cattle gates 

across both ends, but left them slanting open. I read 

the message as DANGER, but not for you, 

not really. I take its invitation—the provision 

signaling in two directions. I want to see the whole 

panorama of the birds, flying up from under 

the bridge’s beams in extravagant loops, wings 

open to take the air, then tucked to glide 

back under to their nests, the thunder 

of the water over rocks as their contra basso, 

their chatter a countermelody, the wind moving 

through grasses at the banks maybe the motif,

recurring, that holds the whole composition together?

Anyway, that’s a little conceit I consider briefly, 

standing on the bridge that’s a ruin, or about to be, 

as the birds perform their aerial feats: 

I come to see it every year, I hold it sacred, 

though I know they soar and plummet for no one 

but themselves, and certainly not for me. 

And really, the birds are almost beside the point, 

rather that I come to them every year, 

at home in this world, its grasses and snaking river 

a garden out of which I grew, always knowing 

I could return, could watch for decades

as the bridge began to fall apart, and people

considered its repair, and the birds made

their nests and the water ever tore its passage 

downhill, and made the banks yield to its fury. 

Rocks, river, the wide sky and its rookery, its hawks 

wheeling overhead: all this I have studied, 

with a little field guide fit to my hands, 

lenses trained to loop and soar in the patterns 

of bird flight: and you, whom I have invited 

to cross this possibly treacherous bridge with me, 

you might read that sign and believe it, believe 

that the river I show you is not yours to cross, 

in fact you may not see yourself in it at all: for you, 

perhaps, the field appears nearly blank, does not 

welcome you, its tract is not your book, its sphere 

is not your ground. It should be no epiphany 

to say so, I should have known it by now. 

My path to the river will not be yours, 

and your path to wherever you’re going, 

folded into the map you hold that I can’t see, 

will not be mine. And what of it? This bridge 

is going to fail, and no tentative bravado of mine

will stop that disaster from its event. Will it interest you 

to know that today, I saw, fleetingly, a swallow, 

violet-green, and a tanager’s red neck? my missal 

is a folded page, tucked into a pocket 

next to a pen, for when the word occurs to me, 

set into flight by the downward swoop 

of passerines. And yours? I am curious: 

if I show you the figures the birds make of the air, 

tell you that I am of the people who build and then 

neglect bridges, will you open your book, 

its alphabets inscribed both faint and bold, 

interpret its languages, unfold it, show me

the print faded into the creases? Tell me

what birds, if birds, inscribe your skies? what 

the grasses are, if grasses, that score your music?