No space warp, teleport or time machine,
                    this wooden tunnel into the past remains
                    as ordered, "a load of hay high and wide,"
                    though ornaments on the portals show its builder
                    knew his classics: made them to look like ancient
                    pilasters and cornice returns; today, inside,
                    the rows of kingposts are like colonnades
                    improbably remaining after earthquakes.
                    No silence is louder: each of its hardwood pegs
                    tolled for its oak tree as it was malleted in--
                    among the hundreds, not one loose. They worked
                    to make the timbers hewn from the heartwood of the best
                    of the uncut forest grow together again
                    as one--a magnificent wilderness hollow trunk
                    fallen across the stream. On moonlit, windswept
                    nights you can hear the bridge and the trees around
                    like a pack of the wolves that roamed these hills before
                    the settlers' drives doomed them, the higher, louder,
                    throat-voice of the bridge leading the rest.
                    The spirits of boys, like those chubby angels
                    of Renaissance paintings, are everywhere: some loll
                    on the highest roof beams, or swing from one to another;
                    carve their initials or their names with jack-knives;
                    fish through cracks in the floor; dive through windows
                    into the swimming hole below. One older,
                    more serious, waits with a shovel for winter, to snow
                    the bridge so sleighs can cross. Another, more serious
                    yet, is making a wooden model: the day
                    will come when he stands atop a triple arch
                    so vast the mockers call it his folly--a wooden
                    suspension bridge a generation ahead
                    of its time--and he will walk to the center of
                    the ridgeline and shout, "If she goes, I go with her!"
                    They pull away the scaffolding beneath,
                    it settles--and the bridge, the world's longest
                    single wooden span, remains to this day,
                    hardwood married to softwood. The girls were there,
                    too, initials in hearts on the walls attest.
                    What other blessed place was sanctified not
                    by deaths of animals or splinters of bones
                    of murdered saints, but with the kisses and wishes
                    of all the secret loves exchanged therein?
                    This temple of democracy, with its arch
                    reaching in one direction back to Greece,
                    leads in the other....beyond. Who imagined
                    past the iron horse, the horseless wagons,
                    exceeding the weight of anything those roads
                    had seen? This much of life beyond the grave
                    they proved: do what you do the best you know how
                    and you will do better than you could ever know.