A couple times a day small curls appear
in the water. I come sometimes to the river
to see them. The best place, I’ve found,
is an old trestle bridge. Now it’s been renovated,
but I climb out to the pillar, and its high walls
hide me from the train. It isn’t often.
I don’t like nostalgia, and it is for this reason:
If I let it, memory hides me too.
I look down that cement pillar at the water
turning in on itself. This is the tide
finding an objection.
It moves, and this is what calls me to say: behind.
One could lose something in this wake.
An occasional whitecap, maybe.
Was that a fish? Spend some hours
enjoying the surf, dunking friends,
splashing, confusing the sand crabs,
and this will be the feeling:
The sway. This way. No, back.
The day that comes over me is twenty years vanished.
Summer, last day of high school.
I was pushed off this bridge, from this perch,
looking at this … well, not the same water.
Pushed by my best friend.
What about him now?
I remember taking the muscle car and driving,
driving deserted three A.M. streets, driving out to swimming holes
in June, longer falls and colder water I jumped on my own,
with smooth grotto walls. A strength I could trust,
him lifting me out of the water from an overhanging tree.
A river close to the bay changes its mind.
You can see this in many things, but
I am on a bridge, resting my arms,
peering down at an opaque chocolate,
so I see it here. Theoretically
I know it is moving, and these swirls are proof.
But I remember footprints in mud.
And memory is so foolish, now it looks like the water.
There is nothing surprising about having an insight,
but I’m taken in the thought,
at the moment of changing directions,
there must be one point that is still.
If this river has came to a halt, then the bridge
would be moving. Like locks of hair, the wake
tangles. I follow it and look up, up the river.
The far distant mountains are getting farther,
and I’ve gone down the river into the ocean, the shore with me,
all quietly with just this small disturbance to show it.
That impossible reversal a tidal river turns twice in one day,
I feel now once, and know a tide
is a powerful thing. Even here, I am
pushing against it, but it is gone.
If I can keep this tide
and the pushing against its absence,
if I can move in two opposing directions,
if I can hold that thought,
then for as long as the memory lasts
I understand why that kid I was
wanted to be held and wanted to be let go.
Why in my memories I am climbing up
a smooth grotto cliff and wanting to find my own hold,
but there, in the way, is the outstretched hand.
And this is how a bridge must feel,
but unlike me, it has no chance to know,
to leave its water and measure its old sense.
But the cement pillar doesn’t really give at all.
Perhaps it would feel no change, for
I do not feel the tide, but my habit
of correcting for it, acclimated in the muscles.
Part is submerged, part is supermerged.
Over it, I say, ready to jump, and I push.
Then nothing pushes back
and I say, how strange.
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