"Sound of a Body Falling off a Bridge," by James Hoch

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

I can tell you there is no word for this
in any language. I've asked

and everyone seems to confirm
its translatability.

Feet shuffling off a stone pillar-
simple, but not easy. A young tree

fracturing under the sudden weight-
exactly how one imagines it.

And somewhere between shuffle and fracture-
the silence of Scott Koch's body

falling off the Normanwood Bridge,
which is also the silence of stars.

~

They write their arc over faces
of stones staring up from riverbed,

and if you were a swarm of mayflies
hatching in the pre-dawn, coal-dark

aubade of a Susquehanna morning,
or if you were a freshman in college

and bought some pot and drove out
with friends to gaze at stars,

you would know stars make a hell of a racket.
Like time, like death,

they scrawl their inscrutable marks
of light.

~

Say you are not a hatch of insects
or one of those kids wrecked and lovely,

their skins' leaf-awkward sheen.
Though if you were, you'd be lost

in a fury of living and dying.

So you'll have to trust the words
for the way his face twitched, went

stone-white, for how unbeautiful
his body comprehended night, words

for a breath untaken, the arrested
air in his lungs.

~

I give them to you piecemeal,
hand over hand, as if in aftermath

we build a city of bridges. I press each
against your mouth. They taste of salt.

They fall into place. They are beginning
to mean less and less. They only do

what they do. For anything else, you'll need
something like a life, or memory-

car tires ticking over a bridge, wheel
of a flower cart knocking cobblestone,

seams, separations.

Comments

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[birdundrstander.livejournal.com]

Okay, random story, but when I was in middle school there was a girl I had known from elementary school who was walking to school on a train track bridge, and the train came up behind her and she didn't move far enough to the side of the bridge, and she got hit and fell off onto the rocks below, and she died a day or two later. And this poem made me think of her! :D

...

:/

[raggedclause.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this.

[bennybunny.livejournal.com]

Lovely poem. Thanks for sharing.