After the Fall

“Despite the warning signs and a tall fence that surrounds the trestle, Pope Creek has had several accidents and deaths, some possibly related to looking for the Goatman. . . . this satyr holds the tragic distinction of being one of the most dangerous mythical animals in North America.”

—Washington Post, April 26, 2016

“A fifteen-year-old girl dies in yet another train accident on the Pope Lick trestle”

—headline, Louisville Courier-Journal, May 28, 2019

At the park path near my home, my dog
stops always to sniff around her makeshift memorial,

a plastic wreath, a laminated poster with her photo,
at the foot of the train trestle from which she fell.

I look up 90 feet towering over, the equivalent
of falling from a building with eight floors.

Each time I pass by I wonder what in the world
could have urged her onto the tracks that night?

What dare? What thing was she looking for,
and did she find it before she heard the whistle?

Had she not stepped onto the trestle that evening,
had the train not been coming, perhaps she’d be

living in a dorm that high. There’s a tower like that
at the university my daughter attended. Or the girl might be

working in an office building.
When time for her break,
she pushes back from her metal desk, catches a glimpse

down eight stories to the street below, all busyness
stopped for a moment at the red light, the delivery trucks

idling, the bicyclists balancing, keen
to wheel on. Perhaps forehead on cold glass,

she shudders, feeling a little dizzy. What might that
fall be like? At whose feet might she land before?

Someone hurrying home with a birthday cake
with blue icing or a bouquet of hydrangeas?

And what of their celebrations then?
We hear the sirens while out on

the screened porch, rosé wine in hand
on a warm Saturday night, dog curled

at our feet, when in a fallow field
beneath the trestle, the policewoman,

our neighbor, with teenagers of her own
at home (or so she thinks), walks toward

a patch of crushed blond grass. In
the byline of the newspaper article, the next

day I read the name of my student.
She’s the reporter called to talk to witnesses:

she makes notes, standing beside the stream
that has always run under the trestle. A slow

rain begins to pock the water. We hear it,
too, striking our porch’s red metal roof.