The Bridge Wife
by ~Taralitha

To Anna Maria on the occasion of one of our many weddings

I.

I have moved beyond humans now.
Beyond voice and touch and sound.
There is only you now - the chilling silence
the racing throat as I touch your struts.
Your peeling paint, your mid-throe arches
like a woman in orgasm - beyond movement
to venerable constancy, impenetrable
and ageless: to still.

II.

If you are bridge wife, I am bridge husband,
kissing my bridge bride with my pinkies as I pass,
saying good morning as I fly by on the bus,
saying good evening and lingering, lovingly,
with a paper cup of tea and apologies.

Perhaps it is lonely for us, never staying the night.
And people may not ever understand your song,
the rushing crying when the wind moves through you
or the way you shudder when the trains pass.
Surely they do not understand me.

It is lonely not staying the night.

III.

I am a jealous spouse.
This is something I relinquish to you, like a gift,
and you accept the way only you can. In silence.

I resent - bitterly - those other men who touch you,
with fingers and footsteps and spray paint and scrapers.
I resent your traffic: the eyes that are always watching,
that never leave us alone. I resent the long whip of winter
which keeps us apart, for I am human, frail and infirm,
and I cannot withstand the cold.

All the moments and hours snatched up by the vast failings
of my mortal form, by work and sleep and sheer need
for warmth or shelter that you cannot provide, airy love.

But most, in my darkest moments of angry seclusion, of apart,
I resent you most of all, for your immutable constancy:
you will stand the test of time while I will fall before it.
Some things my hateful heart cannot absolve. That is one of those.

IV.

Humans lose their glamor.
I can see the chips in their eggshells,
the dents in their dermis armor.
Humans fall apart. So easy and they die so quiet.

I see women and look for their buttresses.
Analyze their angles for stability and strength.
When do they paint themselves; when do they fix
their fault lines? Steel beams under soft skin,
pipes that move the water.

And always, always in them I see you, Anna Maria,
your agelessness, your forever fulfillment and peace.
They leave me cold. To me they are less human than you,
less sentient and alive than your long stone body.
They will never feel the wind move through them
or shudder under trains without falling apart.

I cannot fix their mortal flaws. For that I am sorry.

V.

I have plans for the two of us.
Death plans. I want them to grind my bones to dust
and feed it to you, dip their wet fingers into my chalk
and paint love poems of me, cement us metaphysically.
If they ever knock you down, I'll die a second death,
the proper one. So we can be forever.