[Dichtung]

Mary Szybist
So-and-So Descending from the Bridge
It is so and so and not the dusty world
who drops.

It is their mother and not the dusty world
who drops them.

Why I imagine her so often
empty-handed

as houseboats' distant lights
rise and fall on the far ripples—
I do not know.

I know that darkness.
Have stood on that bridge
in the space between the streetlights
dizzy with looking down.

Maybe some darks are deep enough to swallow
what we want them to.

But you can't have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness.

I think that she will never sleep as I sleep,
I who have no so and so to throw

or mourn or to let go.

But in that once— with no more
mine, mine, this little so, and that one—

she is what

out-nights me.

So close. So-called

crazy little mother who does not jump.