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.