--- J A M E S   H O C H

I can tell you there is no word for this 
in any language. I've asked

and everyone seems to confirm
its translatability.
 
Feet shuffling off a stone pillar-
simple, but not easy. A young tree

fracturing under the sudden weight-
exactly how one imagines it.	
	
And somewhere between shuffle and fracture-
the silence of Scott Koch's body

falling off the Normanwood Bridge,
which is also the silence of stars.

                ~

They write their arc over faces 
of stones staring up from riverbed,

and if you were a swarm of mayflies
hatching in the pre-dawn, coal-dark 

aubade of a Susquehanna morning,
or if you were a freshman in college

and bought some pot and drove out
with friends to gaze at stars, 

you would know stars make 
a hell of a racket. Like time, like death,
	
they scrawl their inscrutable marks 
of light.

                ~

Say you are not a hatch of insects
or one of those kids wrecked and lovely, 

their skins' leaf-awkward sheen.
Though if you were, you'd be lost
	
in a fury of living and dying.
	
So you'll have to trust the words
for the way his face twitched, went 

stone-white, for how unbeautiful 
his body comprehended night, words 

for a breath untaken, the arrested 
air in his lungs. 

                ~

I give them to you piecemeal,
hand over hand, as if in aftermath

we build a city of bridges. I press each
against your mouth. They taste of salt.

They fall into place. They are beginning 
to mean less and less. They only do 

what they do. For anything else, you'll need 
something like a life, or memory-

car tires ticking over a bridge, wheel 
of a flower cart knocking cobblestone, 

seams, separations.