Elizabeth Seydel Morgan

From the old bridge we’d been stopped on, a little below us, it looked like a diving board. When the girl switched her sign from Stop to Slow I saw across the river three men standing like old- fashioned divers at its base, newsreels we’d seen of men in swim caps. “Hard hats,” you literal you. You agreed with “like a diving board,” but no spring to it. Something below was holding it up, something concrete. It was the business of your life. Concrete— but for me the men were waiting their turn over there, each to compete for the best two-and-a-half gainer to knife the Tye River. They’d die, you said. “That’s a fine span,” I learned, “a very long one— they didn’t make ’em like that back then.” Or us either, I thought as I almost saw the Hard Hat bounce at the tip, his one knee up to his waist. “Inspectors,” you said as we drove across, “lolly- gagging.” Whichever. Our span is ready.

It keeps on happening again and it will be forgotten again until it’s September. We’re in the tall building paying the bill overdue to the city for gas to fuel our furnace. We’re thinking November— it keeps on happening again—and we’ll need heat. Now it’s still summer, too hot until fall to turn off the AC . Consider that other cloudless day, paying the bill in City Hall. It’s way too high now, still we pay it. Look at the line, at him, her— it keeps on happening again and it will. Energy’s costly. We forget it can kill. Though some of our children can’t remember, we in the building paying the bill look at the date, at the window sill, think of their choice between jump and tinder. It keeps on happening again and it will. We’re in the tall building, paying the bill.