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2 Bridges Review
molting of a bird. But what if many feathers fell from a place seemingly higher than any boy could ever climb, beyond the top of Savage Mountain and obscured by clouds, what might you think then? A flock of birds smithereened by hunters? By a jet? And let’s say the feathers were large and grayish, some of them bloody, with signs of tendon and muscle broken off, would you worry about a resurgence of enormous raptors only the Air Force knew about, and had decided to destroy? For years now you’d heard rumors of homeless gods in the vast emptiness. And if they’d appear in your dreams, as they sometimes did, begging to be believed in once again, you’d feel this icy refusal hardening in you. And when you woke you’d feel it, too. Your better self wished to believe the feathers signaled a parade, an occasion of a triumph, and what was falling might be a new kind of confetti, but what was there to celebrate? Was the world, as you knew it, simply over, no more rain or snow? Would there always be just this strange heaviness coming down, covering what used to be the ground? I think if I turn any of those ifs into statements, it becomes a little preachy, becomes another kind of poem. The ifs allow the claims to be provisional, tentative. They become propositions rather than certainties. Easier for me to entertain things that otherwise couldn’t be entertained, or keep me from sounding pedantic. But I don’t want to be a total if guy! It can become a schtick. It has to feel like a legitimate if.