When lights flash, bridge is up

With two sentences borrowed from the article
“The bridge’s long shadow” by Jane Seyd

I was in the City of Bridges, always nervous
always crossing water to get anywhere.
The lane changes needed before the GPS
voice could say them. The Morrison Bridge
the Hawthorne Bridge, The Burnside
Bridge, The Steel Bridge. Bridges to cross
between the restaurant we’d wanted to go to
and the one that was open. The bridge
we thought we’d turned onto going
the wrong way until we saw the sign
facing us that said, “When Lights Flash
Bridge is Up,” and we knew we were safe.
I read poetry in a friend’s house on the crest
of a mountain, the view breathtaking.
Up there, I knew, the world could belong
to me even if I didn’t always belong to it.
She’d put a sign in the yard that said
“Poetry parking this side,” and I felt
that this was a world I could exist in.
Earlier on the meditative path of a solace
garden, I thought of the elephants
I’d seen at the zoo. The ones my son
had fallen in love with, the small circle
that had become their lives. But I tried
to appreciate that we were there
that Liam loved them. That he wanted
two elephants from the gift shop
Mama and Baby, because now this
was his idea of elephant. When you
and I talked it wasn’t so much of loss
but of what we had never had. Those parts
we’d been born without. The pain passed
down from pogrom to shtetl to Auschwitz.
The way fury and fear were more real
to us than love. That day you found
a bridge of your own.
You told yourself:
Here you are.
You can decide to slip
a little bit
and you’re gone.