Bridge

Since I picked up the guitar, listening to music’s
not the same. My brain hears patterns. Verse chorus
verse chorus_____bridge_______ chorus, fade.

My teacher says the bridge is where a song
takes risks, steps onto the Road Less Traveled.
“Yeah, man,” I say. “I get it. Robert Frost.”
He grins, cues up an Ozzy tune, plays lead
along with Randy Rhoads. Driving, writhing strums
push Ozzy’s wails of “I don’t know.”

I don’t know either, Oz. I’m almost eighteen.
Almost done with high school.
When people ask what I’m doing next year,
I want to scream, “I don’t know.”

“Here it comes,” my guitar teacher says.
A bit of bass and then, everything s l o w s.

_____________Randy Rhoads

fills the practice room. The bridge. A change
in rhythm, dynamics, a path to the song’s culmination.

I don’t know what my bridge is.
The only song I know goes: school work
school work college work______ f a d e o u t.

Laura Shovan is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and a middle grade novelist. Among her award-winning children’s books are The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, Takedown, and A Place at the Table, written with Saadia Faruqi. Laura is a longtime poet-in-the-schools. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.