Fifty/Fifty

For Sarah

1. Sheep Bridge

Why would a bridge require
Anything from its burdens?
It's not alive. It doesn't aspire
To anything certain.

It's an arrangement
Of tar and stones, cement and wood,
A momentary estrangement
Of gravity's evil and good.

One asks these things, sheepishly,
Knowing they're rhetorical,
Swaying a little, sleepily,
In suspense above the portal.

2. Beam

You wouldn't think the deep woods
Had a bridge in the middle
Unless you were the deep woods,
And dropping logs in ravines
Was what you did in a storm
When the winds get too gruesome
For any kind of thinking.

If you are the woods, you know
Ravines belong to themselves
And are none of your affair.
Some days must be sacrificed
To throw beams across water,
A few to last as archways
Between might be, isn't, and were.

3. Branches of the Log Supine

What do we have now, however
We got here? Retracing
Is an option tempting
As falling. The ants,

Those complicated sisters,
Comprehend the skin
Of the last one over among them
To wonder on the other side.

There's no reorientation
For the green magician,
Barely time to make camp
Among the unknown fictions.