Nexus

by Sarah Williams-Devereux

What this bridge must carry: concrete, rebar, its own careful weight,
light enough to rise, strong enough to bear our bodies across,

we people of great hills and strong calves and lightning strikes and broken chains,
our etched portraits and flower baskets, our quaking greens and numbered schedules,

the gold corn bushels and soft coal buckets we dig from the earth,
the live weight of our grieving, solid feet.

How can we make these burdens softer for one another,
transform this dead weight into living light?

Our struggle: tension and compression, gravity and history, erosion and truth,
Us at one end, Them at the other, the invisible center rising between,

trapping us for a moment in our blind spots.
And isn’t that what matters, to trust in our steps,

always moving toward each other, toward a nexus we cannot see, only feel,
knowing we can be in the same place at the same time?

Let us gather in reverence, in gratitude,
bring offerings of whiskey and incense, maple and milkweed:

to dark valleys and wide rivers, to all the empty, shattered spaces,
thank you for teaching us the meaning of separation;

to those who set these piers and girders
with blood and bone and bruised, brave hands,

thank you for teaching us the meaning of connection,
for granting us safe passage across plateaus older than thought,

Fulcrum

by Fred Shaw

I am not the Brooklyn, nor the Golden Gate,                     but I can get you
there from here.               I am a forearm, ulna and radius, pulling you closer,

like a handshake or a hug.           My cement holds the sweat of labor, the curse words
of one foreman, a bubble of air trapped         among the aggregate of sand and stone,

a breath from another time and place. In the dark, I can hear the hiss of taggers
bombing the gray spaces below, leaving        their pastel fingerprints all over

what’s hard and blank beside the rails and ties.  My steel girders and seams allow
the rolling whisper of tires.         I never tire of those bass lines rumbling

from car trunks or the titter of hand holding lovers walking up and down my vertebrae.
Bounded by sumac going red in fall and smelling like wet dog

by early summer, I watch the seasons change, see clouds as my inverse drifting overhead,
wait to be warmed by a shower of rays              or cooled by the hard rains tumble.

All day, I counter                 gravity                 forget my fear of heights or change
while bordered by church, school and row office             filling the gap

between the have         and the not               that crisscross these hills.
I am a homely ribbon pinned          atop the beating heart of this place, waiting

on you to downshift                 to slow for traffic              to take a deep breath
before my steep grade        amidst     the choking exhaust of a big rig ready to unload.

I am forgotten in the form                 of locks of love                 an empty beer bottle
a piece of buttered bread             dropped and drying on the table of my back.

And though I offer       no parking at any time     and have no busking horn player to greet you
remember me as             essential          a fulcrum                 a steppingstone

where you can forget about           torsion and shear       instead          letting me lever you toward
thoughts of something            bright and warm   what awaits you after the last bend for home

Find out more about the poet Fred Shaw, his work, and more in this blog post. 

Mile Marker 322

by Michelle Stoner

Start with the flowers: hostas, lilac,
firework of the bright hydrangea.

Move to the lichen, greenblue
on stone, ancient, and wonder

what will remain of now, be lost.
Which piece will you miss most

when it is gone, emptied like coal
cars, rusted, running under this bridge,

grey area, mechanism, a link.
Metaphors are like passenger trains, 

bridging the gap between east and
west, moss and fence, and you.

From up the hill to the crinoline ball
to down the street where skin is rubbed raw,

you are all these things: stardust and lock
on the chainlink for love, sycamore bark.

You are the woman in traffic behind you singing,
birds alighting to the top of the courthouse dome,

groundwater seeping up from the shale
of this cliffside sheared and crumbling

to the shining steel tracks below. You are
the momentary bones of these mountains,

dateless, but still impermanent. So think now
of what you love about water, before it goes dry.

Main Street Bridge, Greensburg

by Jan Beatty

It’s not the elm and wild cherry
that rim the bridge on Main St, not

the double railroad tracks in the streambed,
the 30 ft boulders half-embedded in the massive

hillside—it’s the breeze you feel on the way up
the bridge walk, past the concrete and girders,

the tall chain-link. On a Monday at noon, you can
feel the whoosh of 10 trucks rolling past in

three minutes, the Mack hauling a front loader,
shaking the bottom as it rolls over Tunnel Street,

the independent contractors on the job: plumbers,
builders, pipe-haulers. What breeze is this? It’s

the hill, the walk up to Academy Hill, the museum
and Cultural District—Get Into It, the banners say!

In these relentless green spaces of the Sewickley
watershed, the slate streambed is sometimes

dry. But what keeps driving are the bodies:
people walking this concrete bridge, the woman

in lemon shorts and sandals carrying take-out,
groups of school children with teachers screaming

as they cross Main to keep them in line: “Don’t go
any further than the steps of the church.” The working

people of Greensburg, far but not separate from
their history of Arthur St. Clair, revolutionary and

friend to George Washington, democracy-loving
human, buried on North Maple—that’s it—

the humanness of it, that is the breeze, the air filled
with work, work, the doing. Connectors everywhere—

trains, walkers, trucks, watershed, green space, and two
churches on the south side. Everywhere you look,

grey, silver, brick, metal—the colors of
work. Two guys in blue bandanas watering the

Museum grounds, a lumber truck rolls through
and the whole bridge shakes. Greensburg rises

in big block letters to the South, the past clear
on the red bricks. What does this bridge carry,

what is embedded in this slant up the hill?
It’s the walking, one body at a time, past the red

bike rack on the left, past the steel overhang on
the East side, towards the Westmoreland Museum of

American Art. On the edges and down into the ravine:
dry sticks, moss, the big boulders. Two Cement

block barriers to stop trucks from flying over
the bridge. But that’s it, the flying. On the Allegheny

Plateau in the Appalachian foothills. It’s the air,
the people, flying up and down the bridge, the people

driving on the way to. It’s work, work, the air of it
the humans that make history alive. Look

South, you see signs for Routes spidering forth
in all directions, this is the way through

and out. This is the place of connection, with a
working St. Vincent de Paul store. The county seat,

the base. You can feel the here of it, but more
than that, the moving. The giant dome of the Courthouse,

cars five to ten years old, no Lamborghinis today,
but a young man with a messenger bag across his body,

his hair long and beautiful. He says hi as he walks
by, then vibration: OVERSIZE LOAD, CAT highloader.

Ohr Ein Sof – Light Without End

by Jacob Bacharach

In the temple beside the cathedral is a golden tree of life,
The leaves bear human names.

The Tree of Life is a diagram of the universe,
everything between the light without end and what mom made

for dinner tonight, a bridge between the abstract and the actual,
the angels uptown and the guys stopping for a drink before

they go home to help the kids with algebra.
One day one of those kids will spot the weak girder:

A bridge seems to be permanent but is at best
a temporary link, straight where the real world dips beneath us.

Creation is only the precursor to infinite moments of maintenance.
The bolts have to be tightened and the concrete poured over again.

You must know the man, woman, or weird angel
Chilling on the other side is worth the trip.