AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

August 1st, 2006

The city is full of strange, alluring places to go at night. I don't mean nightclubs and "hotspots", I mean the edge of the river where the white geese sleep, or the dark, trash-strewn alleyways. Places of wonder and fear.

Places that people don't go - except that people do go there - and who are these people?

Whenever I cross the BU bridge, there is a part of me that leaps over the guardrail - that railing with a perfect spiderweb in each gap between its bars - I leap over it and into the river below.

For the longest time, I've had this vision, but never knew where that part of me went once it landed in the river. Last night, after being chased from the riverbank by a flock of snowy geese with their open wings and arched necks glowing in the moonlight, I was crossing the bridge and I finally saw where that other part of me goes.

There is another bridge which angles beneath the shadow of the BU bridge. From my path of spiders, I look down and I can see right into it. It has two lanes, divided by short walls, the walls pulsating and alive with a bible's thousand layers if graffiti.

One lane has train tracks, the other has gaps in the floor and is strewn with debris.

There are concrete blocks, larger than refrigerators, and they hold the bridge up and out of the water. They also are tattooed with hieroglyphics of the secret city. And glowing in the moonlight, arched like the neck of a goose, is a perfect white ladder. The bridge between the water and the bridge above the water.

How many people have been down there?

So many ways one could get there. I could use a rope to lower myself, spiderlike, from the web covered bridge to the painted bridge below. With a boat or a strong breast stroke, I could reach the white ladder. And what of the tracks? Surely, the artists that came before me found this bridge at the end of some tunnel. Does a train run across those tracks anymore? I wonder. I've never noticed a train before, but I've never been looking for one, either.

I must find out. I will find out. And if there is a train, I will ride that train.