Bridge
Standing on the bridge,
talking to the white-capped waves
that are not truly there,
I whisper to the ghosts of trees,
somewhere on the other side
of what I left behind,
before it came to this,
I came to this forgotten bridge.
Burn the sails and set the candles.
(I do not really listen to the words.)
Burn the candles, set the sails:
I did not come here to make sense
of all that happened
on these run-down stages that I left
for some familiar future of forgotten faces
moving through the dark.
Feed me the smoke of your chimneys;
pour me a draught of your colourless chimes.
(Those are not the words that drowned on me so easily,
but they will do.)
It is the ritual that counts,
like blood that circles silently,
till some is spilled and warms the hand
that drove the knife - that drove it home.
Like drops of blood these words
leak out of me, into the river.
There is no purpose to these offerings,
this ritual of passing time.
Alone at last:
hands on the tiller of night.
There’s silence;
all is silence now.
Bring me your children,
the leaves coming down from your trees:
I will gather the leaves
and burn the children out in the yard.
(These, of course,
are not the words
that drifted off
and died so easily.)
Standing on the bridge,
opening these veins
that do not even warm the night
for one sweet moment - now,
there is an end to these proceedings.
‘t Is done; it will not take
three days, three nights;
no angels rolling rock to bring me back to life.
What angels there are left
may weep over these husks of words
and carry them to Heaven -
or better still: leave them alone.
Standing on this bridge,
not looking down,
I await the second coming of another day;
blood humming through the tell-tale veins.