Poetry Flash

Patrick Cahill

Poems from If we are the forest the animals dream

Dear Sarah

Remember that footbridge in Mexico, the one we used to cross on our way to La Peñita? You were wary of the bridge, not because of the alligator that we were told lived in the reeds just below, but because of its suspended sway. You didn't much care for its height either, though it wasn't that high. But anyway, you crossed it. I've turned that bridge into language, given it substance in another world—that's what we do. Oh I know, the bridge will doubtless outlast us, the words and us. But while they last, they will create bridges in the mind, and in the bodies of those able to feel its sway. Remember. A word that becomes more significant as significance deserts us. I see you still at the end of the bridge, that look in your eye, uneasy but determined, looking in my direction, preparing to cross.

Yours as always

•

Departure

Kingston Port Gamble Hood Canal Discovery Bay

to Old Fort Townsend Protection Island S'Klallam

Sequim (rhymes with swim) white chop against the

bridge rain pixelated the windshield shimmered

temperature dropped the river Elwha something to

remember the last ferry over have you forgotten it all

•

Looking for the Car

We walked up what

61^stoff Alki

back from the beach

the five of usalcohol

nudging us through the dark

misleading streets

the sky breathlesseverywhere

in fragments

trees tracing the black air

we leftback where

wind had whipped your ashes

over the wateracross the rocks

and concrete steps

into our hearts

into the saltwashed air we breathed

•

Fable

"El puente es tuyo"

This is the way you enter the place

why

because the footbridge is yours

why

because it calls you here to feel its sway

why

because you were found among the stars

so

the stars became a storm became a snow a scrim

a screen of water a sheet of air

and

an alligator waits for you beneath the bridge

why

because beneath his memory lurks a winter gaze

and

he has a voice a second voice for you

go on

as light falls across the reeds and warms his blood

isn't there another way

no

will it console him

what

my second voice

you will never know

or bring me to his jaws

till you cross the bridge the swaying bridge you will

never know

These poems are from Patrick Cahill's If we are the forest the animals dream, forthcoming from Sixteen Rivers Press.

Patrick Cahill's new collection is If we are the forest the animals dream. His previous book is The Machinery of Sleep. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. Cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal, he was also a contributing editor for the anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County. He received his PhD in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote a study of Whitman and visual experience in nineteenth-century America. Patrick Cahill lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.

— posted March 2025

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