Under the Bridge

Do you remember that shaky, old bridge
With massive stone buttresses where you
Roused me to the glories of the underside?
You accepted the green slime and mould,
And declared this mythical mass, beautiful.

We gazed at the shadowy world below,
To the opaque water, callow and deep,
Where the vertical and horizontal meet,
Where firmness and fluidity reassemble,
Fixed yet flowing, a haunting, terrifying
And beautiful metaphor about what? Us?
Our culture, our ideas, our unconscious?  

I had no idea how the word beauty could
Describe this odd assortment of material,
Or how you knew that obscure vegetation
Grows in the depths of this stuff; its black
Flowers only blossoming in the darkness.

You converted dim matter into gentle reverie.
Mysteriously, you knew all this, while I, lost
And shaky, isolated solids, abandoned them.
Artefacts in my dreams were immobile, inert
Stuff, foreign to my nature. I left them dangling.
After our time on the bridge, material was no
Longer an imaginative deficiency I suffered from.

Someone said we have to go down to grow wings.
I was born borderline. I knew it could go either way.
Life was tough, so I went the hard way, it felt easier.
That’s OK for now. Who knows what happens later?
We just prepare ourselves for stories and changes.