Into the Country
(mountain road, Iya, Japan)
by Stephen Bridge
Being new here, we stomp around,
bellowing our right to step on their earth.
Our footsteps clang, like dampened gongs
along a narrow mountain road,
dampened by the liquid darkness
of this ancient piece of the world.
A withered woman starts at the sound
of our drunken staccato laughter
and our freakish English voices.
She cowers behind a thin sliding door,
thinking that we’ve come for her,
but we just want the waterfall and pool.
We plunge in, shrinking our scalps
in the icy, pounding shower; kicking up
thousands of miniature mineral stars
that flash and vanish promise in moonlight
against their murky, black water sky;
then we shiver in dripping, silt-filled jeans.
The innkeeper gives chase, trying to remove
a Western woman’s mud-caked shoes;
he runs, arms outstretched, bent forward
like an angry goose, fending off a rival
and when his caretaking hands touch her feet,
she, misunderstanding, shrieks and leaps.
The mountain draws our swimming swirl
down its stony vertebrae, down its body
into the rice fields of the country, and
an old man squatting beside the creek
gently, silently lifts his bamboo dipper,
letting our stirred-up mud flow past.
(originally published in “Postcards from Roadkillville.”)
You Rail
by Stephen Bridge
Tying a shoelace of conversation,
you invariably start tentatively,
but the opposite interlocutor
fails to complete either loop
or even slide in either foot,
not cottoning to your knot.
After all, you can twist it in
a Möbius directional idiom,
emerge on another other side
that no soul comes to find.
It just goes all iron on you,
rigid then magically pliable,
bending itself up at the end
into a railway’s endless rail
for stopping runaway ideas
that never take that track.
Then you thread intricate
blue loops on a whiteboard,
but no one swims through
the open swirling waves
of their greener meanings.
After they clip their minds
back together and file out,
you gently peel off a strand,
which has now transformed
into a possibly-ready piece
of cosmic pasta that you hurl
wallward, yet it never sticks,
never even reaches the wall.