Midsummer Day We Walk the Portland Bridges
Some may use these bridges to drive across the river,
in trance behind the wheel, missing this departure from
earth when we look down on ripple and sheen of rain
the mountains sent us as a moving mirror for sky.
Some may walk to the center and pause to consider
the river, the city, to ponder this point in our story:
upstream for origin, downstream for fate, midsummer’s
high light and bounty from yesterday toward tomorrow.
Back home in the garden yellow flowers on tomatoes
throng, buzz where small bees dress in pollen,
and in the quince thicket the towhee nest is empty
already. What is my work yet to be done?
Bridge-tender in the lookout studio reading
The River Why by the best possible light—
windows upriver, downriver, east and west
where pages turn and questions burn the mind.
In the fifties, Farmer Balmer had to get a parade
permit, start in the afternoon to move his dairy herd
from Burlingame by midnight over the Hawthorne:
many a weary moo and clattering hoof for Gresham.
Our bridges: Sellwood faltering where Mr. Taylor’s
ferry carried high school lovers home: Ross Island
where herons from their rookery radiate in flight;
soaring Marquam where the freeway stalls
at the rush; clanking Steel where trains lurch and
creep toward Union Station; Broadway where sleepy
families trudge from the Coliseum circus; Fremont
with young peregrines tended by ladies with binoculars.
On the Burnside a lone hobo with sleeping bag
carries stories and dreams. On the Morrison one
stranger cries out to another, clutching her hand,
“If you jump, I will have to jump to save you.”
What is your best chance? Midsummer and the bees,
crazy in clover, in blackberry flowers, ferry sweet
from today toward tomorrow. Friends, this is why,
on midsummer day, you and I pause on the bridge
to consider what we are here to do.
— Kim Stafford