And I thought to myself, “how does the Brooklyn bridge hold?”

A thousand days running through nine-fold sinew stretched taut
expanding                  contracting
expanding                                              contracting

muscle holding everything together.

how we have worked to sculpt beneath the flesh, and how it all blurs into shadowy curvature the skin yields to
the way an unfocused gaze fuzzes neat lines over the skyline of a skeletal city wrapped in velvet time.

we have paid enough attention only to catch ourselves in the warmth of rimmed eyes framed brown and hanging in the window.

but incubating in a dark center is the suggestion of bones
hollowed to store the past as marrow

for we are closer than we know
we are bodies to hold in fluid motion,

folding

‘self-sacrificial love’

into our chests as we learn to read the bronze at the end of the bridge:

dedicated to

muscle holding everything together.
undulating waves of laughter.
smiles as shadowy curvature.
tension shot through nine-cord wires.

======

*note: this is the second in a series of six poems written in and about New York.
all photos taken by the amazing Rachelle Tai