Rob Goyanes begins like someone talking to a stranger on a walk: "Went up to cross you— / yes you—". The footbridge is addressed directly, as if it might answer, and it gets a face almost at once. It is "long frowning, / though ever slightly, over Tatum", which turns the arch of a bridge into a faint, permanent look of disapproval. From there the poem moves from a simple crossing to a larger claim, that moving from one place to another is a condition of being alive, and that it costs something.
The bridge is "incorruptible" and "always make[s] ways to places not here." It exists only for elsewhere, so nobody stays on it. The people who use it are ponytailed Venezuelan boys doing wheelies across its "parabolic back", a phrase that mixes geometry with anatomy and makes the bridge half structure, half animal. Beneath them the water fills "the ever-thirsty mouth / of Bahía Vizcaína." The bay is given a mouth and a thirst, so the landscape is bodily throughout. The Spanish name and the Venezuelan boys suggest a Spanish-speaking community, though the poem never explains its setting.
The strangest moment is the isolated "who, / in the face of language, / is in fact, / a lagoon." The bay is called "who", a person, and then the speaker corrects the label, as if mocking the pedantry of map-makers. The line breaks slow the sentence into a series of small stumbles. Names and categories, the poem hints, are things we lay over places that don't care about them. The bridge's whole business is crossing between categories, so this fits.
The mood darkens in the middle. Pelicans "probe her in the night" while the kids pass "ever eerily, / living freely, unknowing / of the hurt / they'll soon cause too." That final "too" matters. It implies the children will be hurt and will also hurt others, so harm is something handed down. The freedom of the wheelie is real, but the poem watches it from a vantage point of foreknowledge. The repeated "ever" ("ever slightly," "ever-thirsty," "ever eerily") and the "always" and "forever" nearby give the whole scene a sense of endless repetition, with new kids replacing old ones.
Then the light splits: one side of the bridge is "whitely lit" and the other "orange aglow." I read it as two kinds of lamplight, which also hints at two moods, clinical and warm, public and private. The bridge becomes a "trafficker in lascivious secrets," a smuggler of what teenagers do in the dark. The list that follows, "teenagers, the body, the master", is deliberately unclear. "The master" could be desire, time, or something more like authority, and the poem leaves the reader to choose. What it names outright is the moral: the bridge is "a forever reminder / that we are all cursed to crossing over." The phrase "crossing over" stretches beyond the footbridge to adolescence, to adulthood, and perhaps to death, since the idiom carries that echo too. "Cursed" is a heavy word for something so ordinary, and the poem gives it no softening.
The ending is quietly odd. After a semicolon, which suggests the thought isn't finished, we get: "Something in the water here / makes lazy bones." The tone slackens into a drawl. The title's "Calmly Now" now sounds like a lullaby, or like a hand on the shoulder of someone about to panic. The calm may be a cure for the curse or a symptom of it, the sleepy surrender of people who have stopped resisting. The poem doesn't choose between these readings.
Formally, Goyanes uses free verse with no rhyme scheme, which suits a speaker who sounds like he's thinking aloud. Lines run from a single word ("who,") to a full thought, and the uneven rhythm mimics the stop-start walk of someone pausing on a bridge. Dialect touches like "a' you" keep the voice casual, while sound patterns such as "slow fluid fills," "whitely lit," and "lazy bones" give the language a drowsy, liquid texture that matches the water.
The poem is significant for how it turns a small public structure into a place where innocence, desire and inevitability meet, without losing its relaxed, speaking voice. It makes the reader feel both the pleasure of the crossing and the cost of it.