By Glenn Cassidy
Carnegie’s university rises in the east,
laboratories where engineers train,
etching paths to the future over silicon.
Carnegie’s museum sits above the west,
ruins of Greece and Rome,
dinosaur bones retracing paths to the past.
All day the bridge carries Pittsburgh
between past and future
while the hollow beneath collects
old houses and worn out factories
like a gap between sofa cushions
filling with crumbs and lost pennies.
The road through the hollow runs skew
to the bridge, neither parallel nor intersecting,
people above and below passing in separate dimensions.
The steel arch leaps the ravine graceful
as the bronze panthers guarding the bridge’s
entrance while the hollow spills on down
to the river and the empty rail yards
where the steelworks stood
when the bridge was built,
when steel built Carnegie’s fortune,
when slender metal trusses
erected gleaming paths to the future.
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