A Bridge Over Ice
A poem from Vermont, for Alex Pretti.
Context
In the blue hour before dawn this morning, I was standing in near-darkness in our greenhouse chicken coop in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. I was shivering in the -18° weather despite wearing all the layers I own. It was my fourth and final pre-dawn trip to the coop that night. Each trip out, I would kneel to light the emergency propane heater we fire up to knock back the killing cold when the temperatures drop below zero.
Every time I had knelt down to light that flame that night, my heart repeated, “This is a small vigil for Alex Pretti.”
Over the course of those semi-hourly trips out into the starry cold, a poem had begun to take shape in my mind.
On my first trip out, all I could feel was grief and emptiness and some kind of catalytic sacred rage that I have never before felt and still cannot name.
On my second trip out, the sound of trees cracking in the freezing dark stopped me in my snowy tracks, snapping me back to heart-stopping active shooter scenarios. After my muscles unclenched and my heart found its regular rhythm again, the first lines of this poem started to form in my mind.
On my third trip out, I pushed back fantasies of violence (left unmentioned here) in favor of thinking how yesterday - and Alex’s final moments - changed me, and have certainly changed a generation of people.
By the fourth and final trip out, which began in total darkness and ended when the Yves Klein Blue of Vermont winter sunrises started to tease the horizon, the map of this poem was clear in my mind.
I still cannot read it without crying. I’m not sure I ever will.
I hope it moves you, keeps you, holds you, and catalyzes you the way Alex Pretti’s North-Star final moments have done for me.
A Bridge Over Ice
(a poem for Alex Pretti)
Last night, the trees cracked
like gunshots, as though nightmares
of ice were in them.
Dawn broke coldly and
I walked the woods to see the
damage. One tree down.
That tall maple fell
North, spanning the creek that was
once uncrossable.
A sacrifice made;
both beacon of strength and bridge
over frozen depths
that will take you if
you hit a fragile spot - but
now, that means nothing.
I will cross that ice.