The Story: The Bridge

A bridge is a promise that two shores can speak. The painting keeps that promise without hurrying it. Arches hold the water. Domes hold the last gold. A man holds the rail, and the evening does the rest.

The lamps wake one by one. The sky lets go its gold. Nothing in the picture is seized. Light is handed over. What the day kept in the domes, the river begins to keep. The city does not vanish. It changes its instrument, from sun to lamp, and the man is there for the change.

Above, the city trembles. Below it, I am still. The tremor is not fear. It is traffic, bells, the small electricity of a place that does not know how to stop. Stillness is his answer, not his escape. He has not left the city. He has found the one line in it where a person can stand and not be required.

I lean upon the rail, watching twilight spill. The rail is ordinary, and that is its grace. A hand can trust it. Twilight does not arrive as an idea. It spills, blue into gold, gold into the arches, the arches into the water. The figure is in profile because the hour is a side-light. We are not asked for his story. We are asked to share his pause.

Not day and not yet night. Here, I need nothing more. The poem refuses the hunger that usually attends a view. No further shore is demanded. No better hour. The between is enough: lamps coming on, gold going out, water taking both. To remember I am eternal in nature is not a boast over the city. It is a remembering under it. The bridge will be crossed by others. The river will keep the lamps. The man, for this moment, is included in what does not end.

The Bridge is a Painted Poem about the hour that joins. It does not choose the city against the sky, or the man against the lamps. It sets him where they meet, and lets the color do the belonging.

Collection:  Architecture of Stillness