The distance between one person and the next was as...
The distance from one person to the next was equal to the length of a
Bridge. There. Right at the edge of it
Forty-four full miles from the heart of the house
to where the road hit rubble and
the brown factories gave way to the wide-expanse
of the empty lots and the long line of trees,
and the old watch tower carved from the side of the cliff,
where from its roof one could see the edge of the world:
edge of the sea: wide arc of the sky that was
uninterrupted: bridge. And on some Sundays,
when the sun shone, and the wind, yes,
was strong enough to blow off course
a boat happily missing: one car.
A brown station wagon, my dad at the wheels
my mother listening to the news
we at the back, sticking our small heads
out of the window, could be seen crawling its wayward
way over this quick skip between the islands.
*
The distance between one person and the next was equal to the length of a
Story. Schools of shark
circling in droves across the ocean floor (dead bodies),
scouring the scrags of old corrals for
missing fingers: Once, in the mid-70’s, they say,
a huge sea monster sick with what the old milling company
had been spilling for years into the sea, hit the foot of the bridge
and caused ten families and their cars skidding off into the water.
What we did not see we did not believe; besides,
it took only three full sentences screamed into
the opposite lane of cars and tricycles and a truck
of dead hogs for us to get to the other side--
End of the bridge. End of the story.
*
The distance between one person and the next was as deep as the
Sea. As if I had any choice in the matter.
Or Tina. Now there are so many, many things
to believe in: drowned, and then found, and
then laughing hand in hand into the waves,
I can almost re-tell the story in a different light
while the whole world was watching:
not break when she did right into the rocks
crystal gelatinous heart when they opened her
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Submitted on May 01, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:50 min read
- 1 View
Quick analysis:
Scheme | A X X B X C X X X X X X X X X X X X A X C X X D X E X X X X D A E X B X X X X E |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 1,871 |
Words | 369 |
Stanzas | 40 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 |
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"The distance between one person and the next was as..." Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/86499/the-distance-between-one-person-and-the-next-was-as...>.
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