A Poem by Dennis Maloney

Bridges

I have spent my
life building bridges
between the shores
of language and culture.
Always straddling
emptiness and danger,
wave by wave,
an incomplete bridge,
extending across a
map of the world.

I have crossed
the Pont Neuf,
the Ponte Vecchio,
as poets have between
reason and madness.
The Bridge of Sighs,
the Charles bridge,
the humpback canal
bridges of Amsterdam.

It is a long, shaky
bridge of compromise.
In the evening I wander
the streets of the city
along these frontiers of
our uncertain freedom.

Dennis Maloney is the editor and publisher of the widely respected White Pine Press in Buffalo, NY.  He is also a poet and translator.  His works of translation include:  The Stones of Chile by Pablo Neruda, The Landscape of Castile by Antonio Machado, Between the Floating Mist:  Poems of Ryokan, and The Poet and the Sea by Juan Ramon Jimenez.  A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including The Map Is Not the Territory:  Poems & Translations and Just Enough.  His book, Listening to Tao Yuan Ming is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press.  He divides his time between Buffalo, NY and Big Sur, CA.