Say the title aloud and you hear the first line before you reach it. "Abridged" sounds like "a bridge-d," and the poem opens with exactly that: "a bridge over the bridge." The pun is the poem's engine. To abridge something is to shorten it, so the title promises a condensed version of something longer, perhaps a long stretch of worry or a whole life's reckoning. Then the poem proves the point by being only three lines. It is the summary, and the full story is left unwritten.
The first line is deliberately strange. A bridge over a bridge could be a footpath arching above a road, or simply the word doubled back on itself, as if the poem were stuttering. Bonta doesn't say, and the vagueness helps. The speaker is crossing something twice over, a passage within a passage. That suits a mind in transition, since people tend to take stock at moments of crossing.
What the speaker carries is "my accounts," and the word works two ways. Accounts are ledgers, sums owed and paid. But to give an account of yourself is also to tell your story, to explain and justify. The speaker may be carrying debts, regrets, unfinished conversations, or all three. "Walk with" makes the accounts feel like companions rather than luggage, something that keeps pace beside you. The word also contains "count," so even the walking quietly turns into tallying, one step after another.
The last line carries the most weight: "settling in my chest." Settling accounts means paying what is owed and closing the books, so the phrase hints at resolution. But settling is also what silt does at the bottom of a river, or dust on a shelf, a slow sinking that comes to rest. A bridge hangs above water, and the image of something heavy dropping through the speaker's body to lodge in the chest fits that setting. Whether this brings relief or a new weight is left open. A chest is also a container, like a treasure chest or a trunk where papers are stored, so the accounts may be both filed away and felt physically in the lungs and heart. The poem moves from the outside world, a bridge, to the inside of a body, and that shift gives it direction despite its size.
There is no rhyme. The sound patterns are subtler. "Bridge" repeats, with its hard opening and clipped ending, so the first line clanks a little like a structure under foot. The lines run roughly six syllables, six, then five, and the beats thin out too: three strong stresses in "a BRIDGE Over the BRIDGE," then only two apiece in "I WALK with my acCOUNTS" and "SETtling in my CHEST." Read aloud, the poem slows down. The soft, hushing sounds of "accounts," "settling" and "chest" make the ending feel like a breath being let out. The absence of punctuation and capitals, apart from the single "I," keeps the thought flowing. The speaker never stops to explain, just walks and lets things sink.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. The pun makes the title part of the poem rather than a label, so the reader crosses from "Abridged" into "a bridge" without noticing a join, and the poem becomes a small bridge itself. The abridging is also the subject. We are given the weight of the accounts without a single figure or name, and that withholding lets readers fill in their own debts and unsettled things. A longer poem might have explained what was owed and to whom. This one trusts the image of a person on a bridge, carrying something that is slowly coming to rest in the chest, to be enough.