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RICHARD KATROVAS The Bridge of Intellectuals If Crane had been a Czech, and deigned to live Till ’53, he might have more than praised A bridge, for in that year of Stalin’s death, Artists and intellectuals of Prague— But only those the Party had to fix After an “elegant coup” in ’48— Finished their bridge across the Vltava. Each morning did they bring their lunch in bags? Did they bitch and curse and clown around behind The foremen’s backs? Were there foremen? Or did Each man (were there women?) pull his weight Unprodded by the ethos of his class? Of eleven bridges down the spine of Prague It stands the shabbiest and least necessary. From the road leaving town one sees the tufts Of grass and weeds muscling through the rusted Transoms that trains, some say, must rarely cross, And notes the webbed faults in the dark concrete Of columns lifting from the water like Wet khaki pant legs of old fishermen. To those whose ambitions for bourgeois fame Got them torn from their tasks to labor here, Is there ironic consolation that, As work is a matter of identity, So many praised workers remain unnamed? Anonymous bones of generations lie The snaking length of China’s ancient shyness; RICHARD KATROVAS ✦ 37 Unknown apprentices applied the strokes That smeared celestial radiance onto cheeks Of lesser angels in the master works. The petty, silly little men who snapped The blossom of a generation from Its living vine have watched their own bridge crumble, And even as this bad joke stands unused, Dilapidated on the edge of town, Perhaps its “rehabilitated” builders— Most dead by now, though some, no doubt, at work, Scattered throughout Prague, in little flats, alone— Feel vindicated in their bitterness, If bitterness survives absurdity. I’d like to know that once or twice a year An old man, whose hands are soft from idle thought, Comes, by bus or car, to gaze a while And simply marvel that the thing still stands. 38 ✦ RICHARD KATROVAS ...

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