This week’s poem offers nothing more – and nothing less – than an image of an “El” train bridge in Chicago that sticks with the speaker. Who knows why such an image – or any image – would lodge itself in a person, but when that happens, we should pay attention to it. By implication, this poem asks, what “particular beauty” has lodged itself in you?
Anne Tommaso lives in Portland and teaches English at Yarmouth High School.
Bridge
By Anne Tommaso
The staccato of lug nuts,
insistent repetition of I-beams.
Girders, vertebrae
responsible for the break
up of the sky.
But then put back together
on the pavement,
in negative, stretched
by the low sun at six.
I know
the particular beauty
of lower Wabash
under the El
with the working,
walking people on a late
afternoon in June –
or is it early evening?
No matter.
It’s that time
when the afternoon
and evening
are becoming each other.
I miss that city.
There, I said it.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2018 Anne Tommaso. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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