Shelley Wong

Rivets and Cables

It’s busy on the spectacularly orange bridge
that yawns over the bay. Fog imbues the scene
with Hitchcock glamour, or malaise. Cars curve down

El Camino Real with their high beams
flooding the smoky air. I see the pedestrians:
tourist, runner, loner. Anchoring this panorama,

the bridge weds shore to shore; its thew
thrumming through the cables. Xenial
ancestral wonder: this is where the sun sinks

like a dropped coin, the bay’s marmoreal
splendor spreads into the Pacific, and the lost
jump and dive, casting a steep line
off the chord. Should I have left? Maybe

I was wrong. I taste the mist and the fog
dissipates in the streetlight. The gold rush
was a dream.