Meaning.

The bridge is a fable.
A homily, parable, hermeneutic.
Yes, the texture of the planks
speak to touch, to skin, and
the breeze from a depth to which one
would presumably plunge—
this one would feel whistling up
one’s trouser legs.

I know, you will tell me the detail
is itself a kind of truth, and so
no call for an exegete:
I look more closely, and farther,
to where the bow of the bridge,
giving into gravity and bellying
down then begins to rise:

up, up, the photographer has framed it
perfectly: at the end, it is
an upright, the body of a headless
and abstract personage:
the steel rope handholds
rhyme the dip and rise of the boards,
but also fan open like a welcome,
like arms, like wings:

what messenger, then, is this,
made of a wet, webbed decay, crossing
some unspecified flume with nonetheless
absolute water charging its own
decline, atomized into the very moss

making my feet slip? And if it is no
messenger, then what? That mist ahead,
it unsettles the question,
and there is no gaze to read,
no voice speaking a word, no tone
to unravel:  I am already
on the bridge, moving toward that end,
I am already within its tutelary embrace.