Poem – ‘The Bridge, January 5, 1975’

For my father

i.

Something quiet punched a hole in the road
across water: in near darkness,

no one saw it coming.

The cleft in the great wide night-mouth
yawned under evening traffic,

as wide

and as deep

as history.

ii.

People fell: in cars now graceless
with gravity, unflighted like drunken birds,
diving through dreams

darker than water,

a criminal current
washing over grave
mistakes,

the doubt

more deadly than a hard nudge:
starboard against cement.

Before there had been the only way home,
now there was an edge:

sudden-sliced,
silent.

iii.

Watch the curving spine ascend
and return with equal grace
to earth: its vertebrae stand erect,
proud over poisonous water: watch
the silent eddies lap abutments,
falling and receding.
The thousand vessels,
the thousand cars,|
the thousand turns of sun: watch
the simple act of passage, time
and time, and time again.

iv.

Remember bloody Des Kelly? Cocky bugger,
chugging beers as the ferry chugged
under the lightless gap.

Des, the bloody champion
making the crossing, Hobart to Bellerive
in ten 10-ounce beers

and a seven-minute piss.

Days truncated, as working men measured
the line between shores
in empty glasses.

v.

Across the bodies

where water meets water

and no one talks                         about the bridge

vi.

We pulled him from the yawning dark, oil-slicked
and bloodworn, drenched
in diesel and the smell of fear,

sodden through

and lost in the darkness of losing his ground,

cold and coughing to raise the dead, folded
in the corner of the wheelhouse.

We said, fuckin what happened mate,

where’d the bloody boat go?               And he said

she’s gone, cut by the road across the bow,
down like a poor man’s puddin she went. Fuckin

fifteen minutes it took.

Any a youse blokes got a smoke?

vii.

East and west are meaningless
in the great scheme of things.
There is no homeward turn,
away from metaphor:
there is only the promise of being home
crossing the benign bridge
that great homeward arc:
that intersection of here and elsewhere,
of what is important and not. It withstands
the power of the tide to turn
the vastness of a vessel against itself.

Look upon that infinite cleft               and let it

remind you: nothing can be promised.

viii.

One car we never found. Might be
crushed under the roadway
that fell across the Illawarra’s bow

but we never found it. Only a strip of chrome:
six, seven inches, twisted.

All that was left
of the journey

home.

ix.

The tide will always come.
The remembering,

skin like old ash, eyes
rollin back in his head like marbles.

The garage door
closed, everyone
safe where they should be
and warm

the roll of the river
cradling us
as if to sleep.

Twilight
lending its meeting place:
what is, what has been.

Cameron Hindrum lives, writes and works in Launceston, Tasmania. Every Sunrise is his third collection of poetry, coming after Private Conversations Volumes 1 and 2, published in 2012. He has written two novels—the first of them, The Blue Cathedral, was revised and reissued earlier in 2023 to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the successful campaign to save the Franklin River. His second novel, The Sand, won the University of Tasmania Prize for best unpublished manuscript at the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards.