Bridges
Not for all of us
When Billie Joe leapt,
when he left everyone on Choctaw Ridge,
I didn’t try to understand.
Someone told me that this song topped the charts in 1967.
But what about the bottom?
In 1976, when Michael jumped off his own bridge,
he had won three pinewood derbies in a row
during our cub scout years.
He was dark-eyed, olive-skinned, quiet and smart.
An eagle ready to leave us, too.
But the bridge near 14th Street was really just a viaduct,
By the time Michael reached the ground,
no one remembered how he had smiled that night
when he won and the rest of us, not then nor ever
knowing his story, burned his memory.
All little boys, how could we know that hostile glares
and un-Packable thoughts wouldn’t bounce off every boy?
How could we know that those who got gold trophies didn’t
always find a place to place their prize? On what shelf”
In which room? And what happens then? Admiration? Gathered dust?
Brushed off or tossed into some attic eventually, some weeks after Michael supposedly went to college, and just as supposedly, failing,
ventured home late one Friday night, and falling,
bounced only once, only blocks from his pine derby night?
Someone dislocated that bridge from its anchoring sides.
Too late for Michael and Billie Joe,
whose idea of jumping still unsettles me.
On wide-town streets and for all the years we’ve been leaping
in our quiet dens over this intervening time.
Glad to return to A Cornered Gurl.
