Broken Bridges

Broken Bridges
Originally uploaded by Archer Braun.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us., with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that our eyes once watered.
- Tom Stoppard

The creak and shift of splintered wood underfoot is sharpened by the soft, persistent sighing of the wind. Every step is a single day, a memory, a lifetime.

Look down and gaze at the reflections of faces flickering in the slow-moving water. Ripples distort, amplify, evoke.
The soft, glottal sloshing of liquid over stone...echoes of the hiss and spatter of another, crimson river.
Taut, prickly hemp threatens to burn flesh with friction. Its phantom heat, the revenant of dim, helpless struggles.
The smell of distant storms, mixes with the memory of cheap whiskey and the dust of the plains. Heated fumblings with handfulls of flesh, and sweat pooling at the base of the spine.
Motes float suspended in the flickering electric light hung high over an ancient quonset hut. The feel of warm steel and grease on the hands, and the distant lowing murmur of cattle in the paddock.
Her mouth covers your own, filling it with graveyard dirt and peppermints. The film of sweat across the back cools straining shoulders, giving lie to the desperate shuddering beneath the skin.
And the music comes like machine-gun religion, tinny and filled with the screaming static of imaginary angels.
There comes a sudden groan, and a splintering crack...

The azure sky blazes above, a distant, uncaring canvas.