Survivors

Survivors
Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY

First day of spring
break and the grounds
crew is out in
throngs scraping death
into little piles
from under
campus shrubs
and into plastic bags

two students jumped
from suspension bridge
last week,
Engineers,
and now
they're installing
fences on
the bridges
that span gorges,

tall, metal-mesh barriers,
like those hastily constructed
for prisoner of war camps,
to keep nature from seducing
stressed students
to its waterfall pools,
and black rocks,
administrator-approved
containment of all learning
in the brick and mortar,

sad reminders
of World Trade
Center jumpers,
the women locked
in Triangle Shirt Factory
fire, fashionably black
Victorian boots
on high narrow ledges, toe-ing the emptiness,
the place
we all reach
when pushed.