By the Cam

by Sandy Solomon

We sprawled on a grass bank near Clare Bridge
to talk—a timeless summer day, as punts
half sunk with tourists wobbled along the river.
A novice punter unsteadily plunged his pole,
pushed, then wrestled it free from the muck. Water
spooled from the metal point as his boat drifted

forward. Such a laugh to watch how he drifted:
one near collision, one brush with the bank till the bridge
took prow, then stern in its echoey vaults of water
and stone. I recounted my own first try at the punts
in the Inghams’ ancient, much-bailed boat, its pole
splintery, stripped of varnish, its mooring upriver

(miles, it seemed) and baffled with vines. The river
meandered out of Grantchester and drawled and drifted 
through hedge-discrete meadows. I worried the pole
would slip from my hands, my glasses slide from the bridge
of my nose. I worried I wouldn’t let go: that the punt’s 
momentum would launch me, clutching still, over water:

a hover, then an arcing descent toward the water,
the affront of having to stand there mid river, 
wet and stranded, watching the weathered punt’s 
nodding stern. “However I tried, I drifted,”
I told him. “No control.” As I spoke, the bridge
disgorged a woman who, barefoot, grappling her pole,

grazed the gray span, then she lowered her pole
to fend off the bank. I watched flung water
darken her blouse. I told him I loved Clare Bridge,
Clare’s seventeenth century rooms by the river;
and, beyond, King’s College Chapel, which drifted
its spires in the sky. We were as brief as the punts

in this place, and as constant—years of couples and punts,
endless versions of a scene—someone to pole,
someone to talk of love, as each we drifted
through and away and back to those views over water.
A catch and a straight course there by that river:
the child who counts stone globes on the bridge,

teenager laughing at punts that crisscross the water, 
students who pole cleanly, casually downriver;
and lovers, drifted, talking through time in Cambridge.

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Sandy Solomon’s book, Pears, Lake, Sun, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, was published simultaneously in the UK by Peterloo Poets. Her work has appeared in journals in the US and the UK—most recently, in The New Yorker, Plume, Scientific American, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and Hopkins Review. And also in such journals as New Republic, Poetry Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Two of her poems were published in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025—chosen out of more than 13,000 poems from in the century. She lives in Nashville (she taught in Vanderbilt University’s Creative Writing Program) and spends part of the year in England.

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