Fortress

Crooked Bridge

Crooked Bridge The light you love—the color of weak Scotch—breaks sharply on the bridge this afternoon, perhaps so the Sunday families can shout their nicknames down a corridor of leaves, race their strollers with a kind of tragic cheer, lose each other briefly, and recover, and you who have come here as your split self can make the important footsteps both of the doctor and of the executioner. You've brought the plastic sack of bread—always the pretense of being the provider—and hurl the torn squares over the rail into the tangled moths, the notched ferns pushed up from the Pre-Cambrian; at once the ducks appear, a slight gurgling in their throats, everything always and everywhere depending on you, until you f a i l . . . . But today an old couple stands beside you, in loosely hanging cotton clothes, shouting in another language, that urgency because of death's warm muzzle on their shoulders; not needing you, they gesture in rage and terrible affection into the tea-colored pond; so you stand in the middle of the bridge as in the middle of your life, alone, until the ducks come in their preassembled throng, Jewel Lake contained and shining like Augustine's description of the pagan world, the world "with all its deep loves, with all its terrors, with all its countless ways of going wrong." 51 ...