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PLAY
I.
Easily, first our red canoe's
upturned reinforced nose
coasts across the rounded rim
of the bridge's shadow, then a room-
like enclosure's thrown over our shoulders and we're
in on a sort of open-ended show, where,
back and forth on the rusted ceiling,
up-angling sunlight's sailing.
Yet it's a harbor where, try as we might,
we can't hold our own, quite,
and though we paddle backwards, hard
toward the bow, we're spirited off-yard
by yard, driven irresistibly along,
back under the sky. The current's too strong.
Il.
Even so, we're under long enough to bring the scene
lastingly to life: a zone where the sun,
though splintered, crowns another domed firmament,
this one brown, and the river's roofed voices mount
to a ceaseless, clamorous hush . . . a place where
spiders in tatters live out a high-wire
existence, somehow coming to base
their very lives above the onrushing abyss.
Upon the bridge's underside the broken sun, too,
throws a web, pliant and vast, and through
the spider-nets the solar-nets brightly go flying,
as if to show up the uselessness in anyone's trying
to snare, however fine the line unwound,
matters of spirit in the matter-bound.
Il.
-Or are we, in our rush to extract
lessons from the place, almost tricked
into missing the all-but-unmistakable? Might it not
be play, purely, that slides the one net
inside the other-the selfsame urge that bends
monkey-tails into question marks, lends the clownfish bands
of motley, builds, of blackness, the more multi-mooned
of our planets and the see-through micropalace of a diamond?
What but play's at work, when an old bridge (one that must
groan and shudder each time, in a rolling hill of dust,
another flat-bed truck comes heavily
rattling over) all the while turns out to be
undergirded by a mesh of wheeling
water-filtered sun across its nether ceiling?