Under the Bridge

Time plays with us. You burn the toast.
You say you’ll call her back at two. It’s 5:30 now.
You plan for next year and twenty years pass.
The youth who matter don’t believe the latter.
Evening comes on and the deer rise.
High tide turns and returns higher.
Fish jump and the surface trembles
with what’s just under. Decades.
There’s a clean half moon and stillness.
A rabbit is frozen in the grass. Beyond
the sweet tangle of vines, it hopes.
Looked at too long, it will die
of fright. The only sound now
is the gurgling under the bridge.

Manet

Six guns were blazing, blood drip-dripping
in the dusty myth of the America West
when dying Manet put paint to brush
for “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.”
Lots of cowboys signed up to go,
to fight and die over there. To free
Jim was the fight young Twain
fled toward sunset. Who knew
it would take so long, that the war
would never end? Suzon waits
behind the bar, bored with us.
Her bottles ready, she dreams beyond
our faceless crowd, with a peony
and oranges, our history be damned,
to being painted by a dying man.

What We Know

Where the land is thin on this sea island,
where a school was built for the newly freed,
now crowned with hospital and community
college some people can nearly afford,
the sea comes close with what it has carried
forever and three great blue herons
stand guard still, scattered again
across winter-brown spartina.
Joined by another now
for me, they’re four.
The water at peak tide
in the yellow of sunset
is smooth as the end of things.
Despite what we know of ourselves
there is almost perfection in the world.

Quitman Marshall’s most recent book of poems, You Were Born One Time, won the SC Poetry Archives Book Prize. He was the founding host of the Literary Series at Spoleto Festival USA, and won the Writers Exchange Award (Poets & Writers) in 1996.  His roving manuscripts include Swampitude: Escapes with the Congaree (nonfiction), The Bloody Point (novel), and American Folklore (poems). After growing up in SC, he lived in Barcelona, DC, Amherst, MA, and in New York City from 1978 until 1990. For most of a year after their marriage, he and his wife lived in her hometown outside Paris. Since 2001 they have lived in Beaufort, SC, with their three children, and he teaches school—sometimes English, sometimes writing, sometimes French.