Another Crossing
Bill Cento
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest 2012 (view all the winners)
Most Highly Commended
This may have been the first time
in years when I have been
at the Carousel restaurant
without my late wife, Vera,
sitting in the chair next to me
—the two of us chatting like magpies,
holding hands or maybe
teasingly rubbing knees under the table.
I miss that tonight.
From a corner window table
in the 22nd-floor restaurant
I enjoy the view of the Mississippi
—empty barges riding high
going toward Minneapolis,
full ones coming back
hunkered down in the water
by their loads of grain.
Then at sunset city lights
flicker on and wink like flirtatious eyes
beckoning the people of the night
to come out and have fun
wherever their spirits take them.
It's then that it really sinks in
that I am alone.
But, the feeling of missing my partner
was different this time.
Sure, I felt lonely,
yet it wasn't the desperate lonely
that I have felt before
—it was a tranquil lonely,
a contented lonely
as if I accepted that Vera is gone.
As the evening neared ending
and I sipped a Drambuie
while watching headlights
stream across the High Bridge,
I felt even more tranquil
and a peace settled over me
like the warm, comforting
embrace of my childhood patch quilt.
I was alone, but I felt it was okay.
I thought to myself:
Tonight I, too, am crossing a bridge—
spiritual as it may be—
on my sometimes bumpy road
to my new life.
