Ponte Sisto
Below the bridge,
an endless eddy splashes back at the hem of the spillway’s skirt, churns a froth of sticks and milk jugs and Styrofoam and soccer balls and tarp and plastic bags over and under in a current bewitched to vortex, backflow. The river cannot choose what it cannot let go, is low today and seems unable to part with anything at all. On the bridge, a woman wears a gray blanket and yells in no one’s particular direction. The passersby part to flow around her body without touching her body or the beggars or their skinny dogs but stop to turn and lean over the guardrail and gawk at the river’s newfound collection and speculate— The contents of a wind-struck campsite or trash of a more northern town dragged downstream, gathered here through confluent accidents of weather, water. Or some impractical joker’s idea of art— the bouncing balls of a lunatic lottery, re-arrangement, de- composition, ever un- still life, inconsolable and constant star-crossed constellation, construct of awkward orbits, collisions. The passersby watch for their favorite pieces of flotsam to pop up again and then do what passersby do (pass by). The hungry dogs watch their hungry masters who watch the possibly unwatched pockets and the woman stops yelling at no one to look up at no one, reach beneath her blanket and touch herself.
|