Spandrel

I wake up with a word on my tongue: spandrel. No dictionary here, I let the syllables roll back and forth with the rocking of the boat, span-drel, span-drel.

I delve among rhymes—wastrel, who spends his legacy and falls among swine; a scoundrel, taking away the loot; a mongrel, houseless, fawning for a meal. All diminutives, all shabby lives.

Spandrel, I will say, is a maker of bridges, as the minstrel is a maker of songs.

I see him carry in a leather bag his mallet, saw, bit and brace, walking ahead of, but never beyond, some history either sinning or saintly.

With materials at hand— washed stone, oak, pitch pine— he joins bank to bank, life to life, across streams too difficult to ford, not worth a ferry.

Each blow of wood on wood sets ripples on the water: deo gratias, deo gratias.