Morning glory

Against the blankest blue Chicago summer sky, brilliant orange shards of fire and shrapnel cut through an arm of metal and tarnish a few feet from my head: so that's what that sound was right outside my window this ungodly hour of the morning. Shreds of alloy and nibbles of wire rain down on the street sweeper below. Two workers in safety vests and yellow helmets, each tethered with a safety umbilicus, in a scissor lift are eyelevel with my third floor bedroom window, grinding and twisting and yanking and sawing at the old green traffic signal, half the size of a man.