This Be the Place: Making Everyone a Poet

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

I’m tussling with a bridge in northwest Arkansas. I love this bridge—commonly known as the Lake Fayetteville Spillway Bridge—but have a hard time admitting it. I last set foot there on Christmas 2024, when I was visiting from Iowa City, where I’d moved a few months earlier. I haven’t lived in Arkansas since I left for graduate school in 2018. Each winter, my visits—from Indiana, then California, and now Iowa—culminate in a walk around Lake Fayetteville with my brother. As I’ve moved farther from the bridge, he has only moved closer; he now lives in an apartment two stoplights away. That Christmas, we decided to go on a quick jog by the lake to kill time before our mom joined us for some low-key festivities (watching basketball while eating bowls of pozole, etc.). On that unseasonably warm day, we wore short sleeves and matching, though not identical, black athletic shorts.

The Spillway Bridge is younger than either my brother or me. It opened on June 30, 2005, just under three weeks before my ninth birthday. Since then, it has hovered above lake water that’s restrained from overflowing into Clear Creek, which, as I understand it, stretches west across the county starting at this point. Halfway across the bridge, semicircles extend from the path to make room for metal benches, one of which faces the dam while the other looks the other way, toward the creek.

To reach the bridge, we passed through a trail threaded between leafless trees and bushes. The world you enter when the bridge comes into sight begins with the red steel arching along the path, the ground giving way to cliff. In summer, the bridge’s red arches break through the surrounding verdure. Red pokes a hole in the canvas of green—a subversion arranged by Fayetteville city planners. But we walked the bridge in winter, when the greenery had disappeared from the branches, moss-bitten and gray as the rocks yards below our feet.

We approached the lake from Veterans Park, from the south, so the dam sat on the right side of the Spillway Bridge. That day, water fell off the lip of the dam with ease, no rush. The rush lay just beyond the bridge, around the corner, where the trail unfurls into a straight stretch with the lake on one side and softball fields, benches, kayaks for rent, and the roar of cars on Highway 71B on the other.

The bridge, the water held and spilled by the dam, and the curved (brutalist?) concrete beams propping up the structure are lush visual cues for pause. The bridge asks the walker to stick around. I wish I could say it was just me who felt this way—then I could poke holes in my unbecoming earnest enthusiasm for the bridge. But when I called my brother the other day and let slip that I was thinking about the bridge again, he repeated my own somatic descriptions of our Christmas jog, the beauty of the view, and the warmth of the day. The bridge might be among the only places I see Fayetteville, where I’m nearly from, in the exact same way as my brother and strangers see it. Even though I grew up in northwest Arkansas and still think of it as home, as a place of which I can speak with some measure of affection and authority, it’s not a stretch to say that, before I moved, I also identified myself against that place, of which the bridge is a metonym. It contributes to the pastoralism of Arkansas, which I’ve always felt a little estranged from as a Mexican American whose father was a migrant.

The bridge is a popular spot to stop on a walk at the lake to take photos, and that Christmas, we maneuvered our way through couples, families, and friends standing on the bridge. Some of them took photos of the water falling off the dam, others captured the thin creek going west, while still others stood closer together and managed to take selfies with four or five people in the frame.

They would have recognized the same things as me: the rushing water; the rocks neatly splayed across the creek floor; the trees bending trunks so that their branches hovered over the water like they were nodding off into fitful midday sleep. The bridge didn’t invent any of these images, but it gives me, us, an essential view, makes these images a kind of commons. In other words, the bridge might make everyone a poet.

I’m drawn to the bridge in part because of its beauty, and the beauty it allows me to see, and in part because I want to call it a fake. Not that I think the bridge doesn’t allow pedestrians to stroll from one side of the greenery (in my memory, the bridge is intimately connected to the greenery, though I’ve established there wasn’t any that day) to the other. But the bridge coaxes in me the urge, or it’s a primary site/sight of this urge in me, to jab my finger into the air as if to say you won’t fool me. I would be happy to resist the common allure of the Spillway Bridge. I guess it’s hard to accept that I am easily moved. It’s a hang-up of mine. The bridge feels superficial to me, and getting caught being moved by something superficial would feel bad.

None of these thoughts on falsity occurred to me during that Christmas jog with my brother, but I must have felt them. They must have been roiling in the dark of my spleen, because I actually rolled my eyes at everyone we passed on the bridge. How could I also be smitten with this manufactured, photogenic slice of Arkansas? Lately I’ve been loving Ben Lerner’s reading of James Schuyler’s poem “A Gray Thought,” which refers to the natural world as though it were arranged, curated, or created by an artist. In doing so, according to Lerner, the poem “reenchants the world—barely, briefly—by converting what’s merely there into significant form so that the landscape becomes a history of small artistic decisions.” Maybe that’s why telling the truth about my attachment to the Spillway Bridge is difficult. It’s as though the bridge does the work of re-enchanting Fayetteville for me, has already rescued it from felt visions of industry encroaching on the landscape.

Or it’s as though someone has already arranged the rocks under the bridge—under our feet—to look just like the river stones at the watering hole my brother and I frequented as kids. As though the bridge doesn’t need us to make it significant. Maybe the bridge is the poet, and renders my brother and me, and anyone else caught up in the view, into meaningful form. The tussle is knowing the “natural” beauty is a trick even as I continue harboring a wish to fall for it time and again on my visits home to family.

On the way back from our jog, we slowed at the bridge and sat on a bench, the one facing away from the dam. We didn’t need to take pictures because we’d already done that earlier in the week when we went for a walk around the lake to catch up. In the selfie we did take at the spillway, the bridge is absent—what’s visible between our shoulders is the rushing water of the creek, the evidence of water intentionally spilled, and rocks holding up that water. Otherwise, the image is just us, two brothers, who must have felt prompted to document our faces, to look at ourselves, taking our cue from the bridge, which even in a winter as warm as spring compels us to think of what’s to come as much as what’s going away for good.