A Bridge

Our bass player’s across the strait,
hospitalized with pancreatitis.
I’m not sentimental about bass players.

Our friendship with his country’s taken 
a drubbing, tariffs, puerile talk of a 51st state,
while I stand here fascinated by an upturned

rowboat beneath a tamarack. It hasn’t moved
in years, not even in the rowing season,
not in the offseason of rowboats

when it would make sense to store it
in a garage or shed. Snow defamiliarizes 
everything we love. Sarah trudges along

in a drift in a preposterous hat and mask. 
Old Jake has a fever. He’s nauseated, 
jaundiced. I see a yellow light

on the other shore and think of Ontario,
Jake yellow in a hospital bed, 
the show he won’t make tomorrow.

Just last night Sarah and I were listening
to Neil Young singing “Helpless”
with Joni Mitchell and the Band.

My voice has aged in the last five years
with what Hiram Walker improvised 
over there. It’s not worth singing

well to sing true, but we worry
about being well, some of us sometimes.
Crossed a couple decades ago to play

an Irish bar—Lord no, you should hear us
play, if you heard us play you wouldn’t 
even ask if we were over here to work.

They threw the instrument cases open 
on the American side. A one/four/five 
progression in the key of G (minor third

for a bridge, that 4/4 somatic beat) is unspoken 
friendship and the best diplomacy. Hard sledding 
for a while, we say, euphemizing crisis,

hard rowing we might say in summer. 
Snowmobilers sled over river ice today. 
I’d be scared of a collapse if I were them.