Every day she walked to school through
the wet grass and along the confusion
of steel, rising to be the new field house.
Every day she walked home, stopping to watch
the huge arches flash with welders
and men yell instructions across the beams.
“It was an ordinary Wednesday afternoon,”
she would say after that, although
it became ordinary only when something happened
to measure it by.
She had crossed the field to Terry Village
where her mother was hanging diapers
on the line and her brother was throwing toys
off his blue quilt. She was standing
on the porch eating a Fig Newton
when she happened to look up and see
the great arch lean and the tiny body drop,
in slow motion, like all catastrophe.
She remembered the little arms waving,
the tremor when the steel struck,
and the dust rising like smoke.
She imagined the body, final
as a bag of sand. She thought of the workman
that morning, buttoning a khaki shirt,
leaving for work, lighting a Lucky Strike
on his way out the door, telling someone good-bye.
She thought of the omens in a regular day,
the arch she walked under ten minutes ago.
She felt like an angel, transcending events.
She thought which muscles she might have tried
if she had been the workman, suddenly needing to fly.