Philadelphia, 1976 Poem by Ryan Teitman

A still night has its own cruel music:
the catch of bridge cables plucked
by stone-scented wind; the low, bent
hum of the Delaware, rippling like a singing saw.

There are other cruelties too:
the extra-inning double in the gap
that sends the summer crowd shuffling
for the parking lot. Those are the nights

when any boy would drop
Pabst empties off the Tacony-Palmyra
Bridge, then watch the stars
strip off their summer dresses and dive naked

into the water. I wave from the bridge
because maybe Lefty's pitching a gem tonight.
Maybe the moon's a cut fastball dropping
off the horizon. Maybe 216 strands of loose city light

stitch the sky together. Someone told me
that the moon was made of cork
and leather and old bar songs
and jars of railroad sparks and braided horsehair.

But what's our city made of? Everything's been growing
too quickly; the skyline's becoming a night
brighter than day. Glass-walled buildings
muscle their way up the cityscape, and I've never trusted

anything that doesn't throw a shadow. So come with
me to the bridge. We'll watch the fireworks
strain into the night. We can fix their lights
into a constellation of an ox pulling down a house, then let

the spent flakes of soot settle on our eyelids
like wafers of host dropped onto tongues,
so that when we open our eyes, we'll
swallow the tiny, failed bodies in every possibility of light.