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RIO GRANDE GORGE BRIDGE
1 August 2004
I
Nearly seven years ago
my lover & I searched
graffiti on the bridge
for our names.
Alone
I search again, successful
this time. I video tape them
& take a digital still for him.
I notice Elvis was here.
So too was Jesus (twice).
Someone saw rainbows
over the Rio Grande &
felt compelled to tell
whoever came this way.
"DON'T JUMP" says
someone else.
II
A quarter of the way down,
north, on the right
among the boulders, I see
a white blemish.
A man goes to fetch his
binoculars. I use
my video zoom.
I see an entanglement
of what—the
man comes back
to tell me—was
a jeep.
Now it is exposed like the
long-dead bones of a carcass
bleached by New Mexican sun.
I look closer & see hanging
over the next boulder down
a long tube, a muffler,
an exhaust pipe.
A woman, the man says,
had tried to kill herself
without success.
Now
she's a quadriplegic.
Her memorial lies
like a mangled instrument
of mismanaged power.
No flowers like those
on the crosses fixed to
the barbed-wire fence nearby
in honor of two young men
who succeeded
where she failed.
Clifton Snider is the author of eight highly acclaimed books of poetry,
including The Alchemy of Opposites (2000), and three novels, Loud
Whisper (2000), Bare Roots (2001), and Wrestling with Angels: A Tale of
Two Brothers (2001). A Jungian and Queer Critic, he has published many
reviews and articles and the book, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made On: A
Jungian Interpretation of Literature (1991). He teaches writing and
literature and California State University, Long Beach. |