Flow

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A crowd flows over Calatrava’s bridge,

so many: who would have thought thought

beckoned so many, as now the station steps disgorge

as many again. Here at the confluence,

Carlo and Gio meet Jill and Anna with large

gestures you’d take as surprise, though

the encounter occurs three days in five.

You might think too, as they pair off and forge

forward to Economia, that this represents

a waypoint on the way to something:

headlong generations of Jills and Gios,

or Carlos and Annas, surfing the horizon.

But we are in 2019 and the Free World:

Anna is with Jill, Gio with Carlo, all own

to enacting acts that would have them stoned

in Sudan, or similiter in the cruel piazzas

of the Unfree World.

After the salizada,

we’ll swing up the canal to St. Job’s – or they will.

I tend to pause at the foot of this bridge:

our friend Mohamad, whom we used to meet here,

has not been seen, nor sent any word, for an age.

We’re afraid for his future, if he has one still:

he told us it was risky to be going home…

Now the whole old year has rolled over,

and we doubt he will come.

(unpublished)