The world danced, as if the shimmery moon that night, just moments before the bridge drowned like
rushing fish who disappear
into the sea
or houses in the fog.

The city on fire with life
in the background;
A sign of going
before the going meant
not coming back.
The people who could not
fly yet,
the rescuers not hesitating.

Somewhere a wife listened to Spanish music and expected
her husband to return in hours.
A dreaming keeper
of heights he was.

A link for people.

But the port ghosts
watched far from the
space of humans.
Setting up a new kind of history for the steel and truss structure
that was a certain meteor into a wet sapphire vault.

Boat tragedies linger for ages;
The Watchers saw all the people on the bridge and the ship,
saw a modern-day Titanic hitting something different
than ice and not sinking.

Too fast for fate to seize up.

Why is the Edmond Fitzgerald song running in our heads again
when it’s cars, not a ship, that sliced the tributary
to descend in the early morning when secrets happen?

A few weeks ago my friend’s foal was born in the early morning.
But her legs stlll stand.

Even they — the mystical Watchers — wondered how does a bridge become
feeble and its meeting
points give way like a matchsticks playhouse.

No one thinks this can happen.

Lightbeams lightbeams
Silver silver
What what
Voices voices
Power gone
Possible cuts everywhere
Cars in a watery grave
A little life surfacing;

The maritime cow yoked
with containers
as large as a building — now a puzzling story around the world — where mammoth lego-looking vessels, in ports, float
somehow too.

The monied colors of a globe.

The same as a skeleton of
yesterday
padding its boot
on the front porch
and then walking off.
People watched the image
as if a swan suddenly dipped her head and then body into
the river and did not come back up to breathe.

God, hand a new galaxy and heaven — a new nightingale with a song — to the alerters and others who plunged dozens of feet in the water
and whose hearts stopped as they farewelled us.

Turn the choirs of angels up.

They never needed to wait
to know that they were
good people as the cold
met the forever.
Their last Latino work the work of moving us and our world, they are saviors without thorned crowns or crosses.

This Easter they are the
story too.

We will remember
We will rebuild,
the head and city people say;
Sandwich shops closed to the people so rescuers can
be fed instead.
People talking on microphones and screens with certain language from Maryland to Madrid telling us for hours.

But the cycles of hope never die.

One day these immigrants went to work and didn’t come home.
The wren is singing now:
you have to make time,
you have to make time,
you have to make time.

You are a pearl
one day to be released
from the oyster and set in gold forever too;
You are a coming or a leaving story too.

You are that sky or that river or that bridge or those responders or those men.

So be kind and love those who are hurting or needing;
Be a gracious beam keeping something
or someone up
somehow
someday
someway.

It’s how we’ll all recognize who you were in the end.