Late winter. Ice cold and drained of color
as fingertips cut off from oxygen.
Heading south on the Henry Hudson

the road curves, and through the vertical
tangle of tree trunks and bare branches
the idea of a bridge appears, erased

and returned by the windshield wipers.
Suspenders thin as harp strings lift
the horizontal span to meet

a pair of silvery catenary curves
so much the color of the day
their outlines look drawn in pencil on the sky,

the volume of each cable, four feet
in diameter and made of enough
miles of wire to crank us halfway

to the moon, reading like paper
pouring through a watercolor,
like the silence in music. Water,

cliffs, sky, birds flicker in the Xs
and Vs of its bare piers and towers,
the latticed girders soaring up

through space singing with the economy
of a po ...

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