Acrophobia at Mile Marker 89

The seven mile bridge rises,
unnecesarily high, water out to Havana
on one side, Biloxi on the other.

The road is four cars wide.
Jersey barriers at the edge
(the slighest touch would tip them).

A heart is a ferris wheel that’s seizing
at the very top.
No way down. No way out.

Above, the paranoid sky
below, bipolar sea,
waiting in its sleek green
hide to catch you

and falling is inevitable.

Dust of spinning wheels
makes coral the clouds,
the bridge is

a white crumbling arc
hanging. Broken

columns sink in submarine clay.
Mind crashes and tumbles.

Someone says
Don’t close your eyes.

Hands clamped to the wheel,
wait to come down in Marathon.

(Poem, later)

It was as if the bank teller could not see me
neither could the two girls speaking
Spanish at the information desk.
I was invisible to the hairdresser
except for my hair. In the mirror
I saw the manicurist, but she didn’t look
up from her client’s cuticles
and the bald man in the gallery
talking on a cellphone to a creditor
only saw my money.

In the over-heated parking lot
Camrys and Cadillacs ignored me
sinking their tires into the tarmac
so did the scarlet striped with yellow
leaves of the croton bushes
and the curbside shopping carts.
If the ospreys on their nest
on the light pole had stopped mating
for a minute they might have seen me.
It was as if I had vanished into
the earth when it was not watching:
in reality, too,
the earth was not watching me.