Bridges, by Walter Bjorkman
Sometimes I want to scratch the skin of a thousand tears off my body and awake in swaddling clothes in your arms. My weeping holds no legacy, no shrift for the poor or helpless, they are only shed for me. We awoke to beastly sounds above Death Valley, got happily lost in the California coast mountains; you gave me refuge years later when my mother died. I could not return it to you in the Caribbean when you came to me for one last chance. You settled for years of abuse at the hands of an anti-Semite lover, wanting and being beaten for misgivings that were none of your own, on Atlantic five blocks away from our place on Clinton—where years earlier we read poetry to the box sized courtyard below, walked over the bridge to Yonnah Schimmels for bialys brought up in a dumbwaiter from the basement kitchen, watched old Italian men roll bocce on the island of Canal Street and saw wonders in the botanical’s of Brooklyn never seen by anyone before. Was it so hard to accept the kindness I showed—you travelled on your own to parts of the world at a time no woman alone, let alone man, could travel. The wanderlust I instilled in your heart forever there. Tony Prince stole one of my sneakers when I got fired from the children’s home in Staten Island, because he wanted part of me to remember. He asked about you in tears on the stairs because we were the ones that gave him the hope that you could not give yourself.
