“With menacing metal jaws
that arch and open above
the river’s reedy throat …”
We continue to celebrate National Poetry Month with this stunner from Zara Raab — a consideration of all a bridge might mean. We offer you a specially formatted broadside to download and print at home, or you can scroll down to read the poem in plain form.
Bridges
Zara Raab
Coming to the Rhine in ’45
the first thing the army did
was detonate a bridge,
and as men are meant to do,
they soon directed traffic there.
I knew the why, knew ruin
came before the ziggurat, but
recalled a bridge left standing
while a new one was built.
In time they lowered it:
bound for Shanghai or Taiwan,
beam by beam, iron by iron,
bolt by bolt, into the long ships.
With menacing metal jaws
that arch and open above
the river’s reedy throat,
tower-to-tower, a drawbridge
would spare me the bondage
of scuttling back and forth:
I’d simply go out in my boat.
(I’m old, but not up for that.)
You’ll find me every day
with rod and pole as I fish
from the river all my trash
and haul and cart it away,
for by ’03, I had burnt
mine; as for nights, they’re spent
in a deep-river caisson,
digging pylons for a new one.
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Zara Raab’s full-length books are Swimming the Eel and Fracas & Asylum. She has also published two chapbooks, The Book of Gretel and Rumpelstiltskin, or What’s in a Name?, which was a finalist for the Dana Award. Other work has appeared in Verse Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Nimrod, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has published literary reviews in Poetry Flash, Ravin Chronicles, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. She has interviewed Chana Bloch, Cathy Luchetti, and Stephen Kessler, among other notables.****
Like what you’ve read here? You might also be interested in Alan Cheuse’s take on a certain bridge and its closing, “The Jersey in Me.”
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