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featured poet – Valerie Bridge


Valerie Bridge

Tramlines ARKANGEL OBLAST 1999-2006

What if you can catch the last tram, number 5, 4 axles, lines laid on ice
glide through a white night over the unreal Kuznochevsky Bridge.
 
Perhaps stay-awake, dance-and-drink all-summer lightness doesn’t exist,
six month winters minus 30 are not normal, and pavements hold fast.
 
Maybe the suspension of lines 3 and 5, the 6 rouble private enterprise grab,
the consequent hunger strike, was a fix, and suspect red clouds
 
do not lower arctic skies, and old-style northern housing is not tilting
as much as wooden poles almost staking rails at unmapped intervals.
 
Surmise  a black-shawled woman and a young child in a too-short red jacket,
mocked by pole-cats, do not daily search for kindling, or keep the line clear.
 
Maybe trolley-buses, trams, passengers, like pedestrians, do not impede
supposed access to Arkhangelsk Vokzal. Suppose intrepid unpaid workers
 
at Petersburg Tram Mechanical Factory, as in so-called unfunded rebuilding
of Kanal Prospekt, do not in any reality squabble over superseded, undone timetables.
 
Let’s propose the child gets regular kasha, babooshka keeps family documents safe,
grows potatoes and wild garlic on ransacked dachas, draws on a cherry-wood pipe.
 
If Peter the Great never vexed St. Michael’s traders in loaves and fishes,
maybe nebulous gases are not noxious, and stars, bears, leached permafrost,
 
do not form in a Saami’s crystallized breath. Perhaps on the River Dvina,
Arkangel Oblast, glacial ice does indeed melt, taking with it bent tramlines.
 
If at some time the babooshka breaks up their piano for firewood,
the grandchild thaws her toes, keeps her school books from gap-toothed flames,
 
this child may become adult, might drive an electric tram, cautiously,
and some evening play Peter and the Wolf and mazurkas on a Steinway.
 
Perhaps the Grandmother will not be transported, indicted for theft,
ordered to build a road that she will some-when walk on, barefoot;
 
as if her calloused, blue-veined thin-skinned feet may one white night
dance near parallel lines back over fractured ice to Arkangel Oblast.
 
What if any of this happens, outside this text, and with alarming fluidity
ice reforms, and hauls a grandmother and grandchild back from their destiny.
 

Valerie Bridge

published in Tears in the Fence, Issue 69, September 2019