“Bridge Jumper, 1977” by Richard Wirick

 

“When I was up
in the air I knew
that everything
in my life could still
be fixed except
what I’d just done.”

he said on the deck
of the Coast Guard boat,
all of the bones
of his doomed-to-go-
on-living body broken:
Twenty stories through
The same world’s new world’s air.
All around him all
That unmindfully
Buffered the void:

Great speckled gulls,
a cliff of trees,
acres and acres
of sparkling foam.

 

 

Richard Wirick has published his fiction, essays and journalism in Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Playboy, Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review and elsewhere. He is completing a collection of short stories, Fables of Rescue, and is co-founder and editor of the journal Transformation. Telegram Books recently published a collection of his prose poems, One Hundred Siberian Postcards, which grew out of his assignments in Ukraine and Siberia in 2003-5, and his adoption of a Siberian daughter. He practises law in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.