Kim Bridgford
August 9, 1959 - June 28, 2020
reading at St. Mary’s Catholic Church
440 Grand St., NYC, on Jan. 20, 2018
Kim Bridgford was the author of nine books of poetry and the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and the Ucross Foundation. She founded Mezzo Cammin, an online journal of formalist poetry by women; Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference; and The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. She is known as “America’s First Lady of Form.”
Bethlehem: Mary
What if you hadn’t let her in? What if
She was outside, the prophecy was doomed?
What if the moment—wombed and under-
roomed—
Rewrote itself?
Still, today, we’d bear its grief,
The way we do the story that we own.
That is the way with hypotheticals.
We get so far, and we are there, right back
Inside the vanity of human breath.
What if what we are speaking of is death?
Perhaps this “just suppose” is how hope stalls
And reacquaints itself with trouble’s stain
Until we can go on; rewrites the ache
Until it feeds us what we then must eat.
And is it fresh, or is it rancid meat?
—Presence 2018