Photo by Billkoplitz on wikimedia
For Seth
José, can you see
The Francis Scott Key
Bridge,
which adorns like a necklace
the placid Potomac,
from your Georgetwon dorm?
Didya notice the quiet elegance
of the open spandrels
of each arch? Three here
and four there in alternating heights?
Each a vacant niche,
Awaiting its own saint?
And the pilasters rising from each pier:
Why Doric? Why the earliest,
the plainest of those ancient orders?
Can you see those pilasters, José?
They are like the hope of generations:
Tranquility and civility.
Or are they
mere gestures, like those empty spandrels?
I ask you, José, because
At the base of those Doric pillars—
Can you see them from Harbin Hall?
–are the simple annals of those
who’ve passed this way.
No real bombs or crushes, but
there is a message more apparent, perhaps,
than any Doric emanation:
Iraq Epic Fail, in a thin paint, black and artless.
Otherwise just names, signatures:
A kinda new school version of Kilroy was here,
‘cept Kilroy was Everyman, in a uniform.
“Cool Disco Dan”—quotes are part of the meme—
is one man, who’s writing on the walls of DC
proclaims but one message: “Cool Disco Dan.”
And NORE in that easy three-D block
and RAZER, whose multicolored spelled-out selfie
seems quite artsy, the work of a confessional poet
who knows only one word. Poor GUS
soap-bubbles across his pilaster looking
like an oleaginous baby in a diaper.
José, my nephew, my friend, my likeness,
on your daily morning walk
to class in Healey Hall,
remember with a sense of time and place:
It took an entire civilization
to build what men now easily deface.
Patrick McGuire is a member of the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. He is married to Chicago theatre director Anna Antaramian. His website is McGuireHimself.com
The Francis Scott Key Bridge is a post from: Straylight Literary Magazine