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?