Superman and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

 Who knew?

Superman in T-Town

Nobody Beats Tacoma

Here's how it works: Beginning as North 27th Street,
North 21st Street just gets its confidence up
when North I Street slugs it and takes over,
only to be vaporized by South Yakima Avenue,
which morphs into something called Thomson.
The streets of Tacoma are so mean they're
mean to each other. Nobody beats Tacoma. Nobody.

Seattle has forever misread the meaning of Point
Defiance. It's not a park or a peninsula,
or a place to play dress-up on your bike.
It is a destined middle finger pointed
vaguely north. Put a penny
on the railroad track down by the port,
and you might well summon Guy Fawkes,
Richard Brautigan, a Chinese laborer,
or a skeptical Puyallup woman, pre-contact.
Whoever it is will take your penny
and invest it in a cloud-cone
hovering above Rainier like the saucers
Kenneth Arnold saw. About the time

you think you have Tacoma solved,
you find yourself on a suspension-bridge,
with a dog, and the bridge starts
writhing like a boa constrictor. Then
it flaps and twists, snapping itself
free from blueprints, taking a dive
like a punch-drunk stevedore
trying to earn a buck at a smoker
in 1931. The dog lives. If you tell

the tattooed woman at the drive-in
that you ordered everything on your
burger, she will tell you, without
animus, "That is everything."
Nobody beats Tacoma. You have
to understand: Tacoma is more
than a grit city that keeps its
bourgeoisie on a leash like a pit bull.
Tacoma is a sense of humor.

Once you get that, it may take decades,
you'll understand everything. I
mean, really, after embedding
yourself in a group of eccentrics
at the Parkway, the Acme, or
the Goldfish Redux, you'll see
the folly in naming streets
and other ambitions. You'll realize
you are Nobody, the only person
ever to beat Tacoma. Good night.


2015 hans ostrom

Three Bridges

In the following poem, which in part concerns bridges, I use the word doppelganger, the fine German word for "[the] double," as in Jeckyll/Hyde, except the a which spans the space between g and n is supposed to have an umlaut, those two dots. The Blogger menu doesn't seem to include its own drop-down insert-symbol menu, so I attempted to import the word (via cut and paste) with the umlaut, but it was refused.

The word was stopped at the border by Customs guards. There must be some kind of tariff on umlauts or something. I didn't want to surrender doppelganger, so I went with the hideous approximation, doppelgaenger. I think this is what's known as a trivial problem.

When I studied German, I was told that, to create the umlaut-a sound, one should should say "a" while lifting the tongue as if one were saying "e," and it seems to work, generating the proper blend of a and e. Of course, even when I seemed to get it right, I didn't sound like a German, just close enough for linguistic horse-shoes.

Incidentally, some people refer to the wrecked Tacoma Narrows Bridge as Galloping Gertie. I just thought I'd mention that.





Three Bridges


You select one item from a mail-order
catalogue. The company sends two
in error. You open the package and feel
delighted, confused, and disappointed
all at once. You may feel similarly

looking at the redundancy of two
parallel suspension-bridges that
now span the Narrows next to
Tacoma. The second Tacoma Narrows

Bridge is the third, the first one lying
now under water, which is, for bridges,
Hell not baptism. Wind that killed
the first bridge plays the new bridges
like harps. Octopi strum the wreckage
of the old bridge in strong cold currents.

You may feel as if two bridges together
are one bridge too many, a failed
engineering success, a planned excess,
a doppelgaenger of spans.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom