Glassworks
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 25
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass fall 2022
    • interview with Yuvi Zalkow
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 25
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass fall 2022
    • interview with Yuvi Zalkow
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
Glassworks

Bridgetender

​by Susanna Lang

You need a light hand, a capacity for sitting still.

You need to hear more than was intended,
catch the words unspoken by lovers who assume
your house too small to be inhabited. Listen closely
for the soft whistles of a duckling lost beneath the struts.

You need an eye for what will happen next,
a boat too tall for clearance or a man too near the edge.
You must wave back at the fisherman who waves each time he goes through,
especially the last time when he has only ten minutes
before his heart gives out and his boat goes drifting with the current.

You look on tenderly,
invisible keeper of the keys:
you can open a way or you can stop
all those who would cross over.

Alert to the changing light,
to the quiet voice of the water at the city’s heart,
most of the time you do nothing.
You wait.
Picture

Susanna Lang’s most recent collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was released in June 2017 by Terrapin Books. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). A two-time Hambidge fellow, she has published original poems and translations from the French in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, december, Blue Lyra Review, Prime Number Magazine, and Verse Daily.  She teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.
A 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, Lang's poem can be found in Issue 15 of Glassworks.

Picture

glassworks is a publication of
​Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing
260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 
glassworksmagazine@rowan.edu
​All Content on this Site (c) 2022 glassworks
Photo used under Creative Commons from vwcampin