Notes in Chalk on a Ruined Bridge
When I first read the phrase man’s inhumanity to man in the other world I found it elegant but inadequate though I was moved by it In the beginning the five of us were angry then frightened—those sooty days still days of hope and imagination Hope and imagination each one necessary to the other that is what I thought Then we had a sheepish sense someone would come to feed us to organize our group to herd us to a city with parks and fountains For a time I would repeat my favorite words and my mother’s choice unprintable ones and my uncle’s forbidden ones my children’s exuberant babble of wonder none of the others shared my interest but I would recite alphabetically for instance my favorite adjectives all the birds I could name authors from seven continents for Antarctica I invented the author Per Mission just to live in my mind in the gone world Still most mornings or what I estimated inside our noxious cloud was morning we’d wait together we were very hungry small starving animals voles and mice with round ears feared us as we feared them because we’d lost confidence in ourselves and shared no vocabulary to discuss what we’d been severed from or where we were I lost one then two then more Latinate or Indian-rooted words I remember liking and slowly the names of invisible constellations If there’d been wind they’d have been words in the wind after some time the acidic air ate them all then I spoke no more because there was no one left no one to listen no one but me to care and I don’t know if I care every stone here at the bridge is coated with the salt of my people’s unshed tears what is caring anyway but clinging to hope which also clung to me so under the broken stones I could find this package of white chalk each cylinder perfect whole and my dream became not that we’d talk again but that you would arrive and you would know how to read my dead mongrel language and you would read it my message before the great rain erased it before the trestle disintegrated after I was no longer hungry or waiting—