I’m driving to work one eyed again, and spinning
up my driveway, into another winter of craters,
and slow lanes, work truck lights spilling
into the black over the buck I just miss
down River Road, and whatever empty miracle
that’s kept me here between double lines,
spilling coffee down my chin and neck,
veering into the lights from the semi
drifting into my lane. Sign says that this
is the last week for the McKeesport bridge,
and I can feel it in the shaking, decay of steel,
ripped drapes to catch the drift of paint, billowing
like an apparition. We have one more day of this,
but the workers are here, already airborne, strapped to cranes,
chained to girders and working in the hover and split air,
no faces, just the shadow of gesture in this morning dark.
Looking at them, I don’t want to think I’m locked into this life,
to be counted among the fallen, but I’ve left the radio off,
because I want to hear that hawk again from yesterday,
lost, but singing away from this freezing sun.
I’m thinking of dinner at 6am, how you said you might want
to go out tonight and what do I feel like? But my mind keeps falling
back to the article I saw 30 years ago, taped to the toolbox
in my father’s garage, yellowing, but intact of the 40th Street Bridge Tragedy.
10 year old victim, body recovered after drag racing accident, it said,
my father among the survivors. And I’m imagining him ten and invincible,
standing on the other side, wanting to do it again, lighting one up and laughing,
waiting for that last race, wondering who would win.
Robert Walicki’s work has appeared in and is forthcoming in a number of publications including, Chiron Review, The City Paper, Fourth River, Signal Mountain Review, Red River Review, and others. A Pushcart and a Best of The Net nominee, Robert currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015). His first full length collection of poems, “Black Angels” is currently available from Six Gallery Press, and his most recent collection. “Fountain” is now available at Main Street Rag Press.