4th Letter to the Birmingham Bridge: nature post #4

Birmingham Bridge, you have never been your own. James Romanelli named you in 1978. He renamed you. Once, you were the Brady Street Bridge, the South 22nd Bridge the clinical name, connecting Uptown, Oakland, and the Hill District to the South Side at 22nd Street. There was one that came before you.

There was a brother of yours, Birmingham. I feel I can call you just that now. There was Brady Street Bridge right under the nose of the Parkway, right in what now, in 2013 seems like the only open space between Brady Street leading to Second Avenue, leading to Hot Metal, leading to your up-ramp. They demolished him, exploded him. His birth, day unspecified,1896 and death, May 30, 1978. He must have been of fire, he must have, I can tell from the photos, the videos, all the heavy dark smoke, the blackness, the gray city behind it; you must have all been on fire. 

Built from steel truss when no one else still did Pittsburgh made your brother strong, skinny, two-lane, and spider webbed. He wasn’t as thick as you are, as wide as you have become, wasn’t as centrally massive in the middle of the Monongahela. He was, from my view in Uptown, a little further to the right. One South Side block. Do you know how many feet that is, how many yards, how many days--it took for him to disappear? What did it take for Brady to disappear? You were only a baby, Birmingham, but can you tell me anything? Remember your family.

I think about him when I stare into the far off hills of Mount Washington and the Downtown buildings that block the West End view. The water, vast, but somehow outweighed by the buildings, it disappears, doesn’t have an end. I think about how intimate the commute would have been on Brady, how much space I have when I walk, jog, run, drive, bus you and how I want you closer, tighter, so I can feel your veins, like I can almost touch the floss-looking truss and used to hold Brady, a pencil in my hands. I think of him and how I could swing upon him like George the Jungle. I think of how they didn’t want you to be you, but an offspring of a demolished thing. 

3rd Letter to the Birmingham Bridge: nature post #3

Do you catch cold, dear friend? Do you catch anything in your webbed overhead? I look up to you, glinting in the almost sun. The snow has been spared for the first half of the week. Now, Saturday afternoon, it is a stick in your asphalt flooring, slowly the seemingly dead-end cars. The snowed-in traffic makes you seem smaller, today. I am claustrophobic enough traveling you in a car, now surrounded by darkness just before 5pm. With honking cars and slush-snow I am more aware of them than I am of you. What does that make me today, us?

If I could be a cold blooded animal just to swim below you, just once, Oh, I would. I imagine looking up to your underbelly, pasted in a gray-brown pavement. I imagine what I see. Maybe your peaked-top of a bridge will look something like a tower of wings rising up over the flat-bottomed sides of your body. I imagine I would only be able to see the birds that play on the brown Monongahela, but the ones on top disappearing to your top-cover of a sky. I imagine losing and gaining company. Who dwells on and above the bridge will do so, still, as I join the others below. I’d swim and jump, to you, rise and fall under you, reaching, many more times than the sun each day.

But, if I could crawl on my belly, naked in the snow, how close would I be? I’d tunnel-slide the runway, cuddle the rails that keep me from the waters. I’d feel everything as opposed to a non-human numbed nothingness in the cold. I’d slide my skins under the snow, slither into crevices of your cracked concrete grounding. God, what would I be, but maybe an open wound of Mother Earth, then?

Maybe as another type of being I’d acquire more answers than that of geographical and historic information. Maybe I’ll know you intimately, then. I wonder about you, massive being, flung between river and sky. I wonder who you are most times when I wonder who am I.