The Red Letters
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.
To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
––Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poem #184
Unbuilding the Golden Gate Bridge
Birdsong cures everyone’s hangovers,
and trucks beep as they back up
through sunrise. My headache
carries me in front of this bridge
that, by the way, is red, not golden.
In a hundred years, I bet, it will fade
to rust, like the Tobin’s symbiosis
with the rocks near Boston Harbor.
The first two decades sprinkle gray, decay’s
invasion, as the wind volleys the sand
nearby. Forty more years of sea spray
and the work’s about done. A century,
though! That’ll glow with disrepair
like drivers turning blind eyes
to pile-ups. Not that it matters now.
San Francisco rain falls all night long.
––Dan Carey
Reading Dan Carey’s new poem, I found myself with mounting questions: does that barrage of morning birdsong really serve as balm to our collective hangover? (And when was the last time I was still awake to hear that dawn chorus?) Who was this group of sleepless revelers who partied so long and hard (or is the poet a self-appointed spokesman, perhaps, for the city’s late-night carousers as a whole?) And what was the reason for such celebration––or is ‘reason’ even needed, beyond the fact that there is poetry in the world and plentiful wine. . .but also weather and rust and time’s rough machinery taking its toll on all that we love? And will the Golden Gate fade to rust, as the young poet predicts––recalling, as he does, the cautionary tale of the Tobin Bridge, spanning Boston’s Mystic River (indeed, an edifice that long suffered shameful disregard?) Or, perhaps, is it true that––in the wisdom of the city fathers and mothers––the San Francisco landmark has been perpetually repainted since 1965 in an effort to ward off the corrosive effects of the salt air? That’s what I heard, back in the Seventies, when I was living on the West Coast, a young man who might easily have fit in with Dan Carey’s hungover dreamers, standing in awe before this stately orange-vermillion rainbow.
But then my attention was snagged by the poem’s mention of a “century” of disrepair, and I began to get the impression that Dan’s faithfulness was not so much to the fact of the moment but to the feeling of a young person who worries that the great overarching structures of his reality (perhaps even our democracy, our culture as a whole) may be in a spiraling decline, providing little hope for his contemporaries who are more recent arrivals to this beleaguered world. It’s almost enough (as they said in old movies) to drive you to drink! And as I watch the morning drivers crossing the span of this vivid lyric, I find myself rooting for the strength to endure, to hope––perhaps for some Chrysopylae to appear before us (that was Captain Freemont’s Greek appellation, circa 1846, for this strait at the entrance to the city’s Bay––a ‘Golden Gate’ into this prosperous land), offering us a renewed sense of promise. Or is that asking too much of a sixteen-line poem?
This is Dan’s second appearance in the Letters. He received his B.A. in English from Suffolk University and, in 2021, completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University’s Low-Residency Program. Since graduation, Dan’s done what young poets do these days: turned to the Internet to (literally) help spread the word. He created three issues of Paradise in Limbo, a literary magazine offering a new a forum for other emerging poets. Some of his own poems have appeared in journals like Crosswinds, Anti-Heroin Chic, DropOut Literary Journal, and Suspended Magazine. He currently manages social media for Grid Books/Off the Grid Press, and works as an Elementary/Middle School teacher.
