The night bridge at ice-out

I’m thinkin’ it’s past midnight, but without a timepiece it really doesn’t matter because here is a place of no-time. A thinking spot, a seat of intercession, a hideout I come to often, albeit past months of slack days and lost hours and other topics I can no longer remember, caused me not to be here is what I’m saying, despite the fact that this remains the best spot of idle repose even when I’m here in imagination only, but tonight it’s real. It’s real because the moon called through my sky window as I attempted to read, then sleep, then read again. I gave up the on the argument, heeded the summons to attend and now I am dressed and present, boots on and harbouring no regrets.

What I am standing on is an abbreviated rail trestle although I assign it different names according to hour and season and convenience etcetera, but at this moment, beneath the comforting lunar cape the trestle is now dance floor of patterns and shadows. And over there, a fine bone china skull cap worn by the wetlands for the ceremony of ice leaving; leaving feathering winter-fleeing romance with the current, arm-in-arm and together they slide into the ship holds of night.

And still over there, the stubble, shorn manes of darkened forest frames my world now quieted, songbird and rooster sleep while rising salient anxious waters carry over shelves of clay and beneath that, limestone and still beneath, the song of voices heard before.

It’s not because there is anything in particular to be resolved, no it’s not that, but instead it is to witness the naked beauty of a slender moon dissolve over drowned and standing hardwoods that draws me here out of space and time yet with the silent music at my heels, the tango that can be heard from time to time, the step of ice in the water as it bows in promenade with the spent rushes of last year and in the catching light they emerge from their cache of eminence, running like the killdeer from beneath the bridge where I stand.

The old bridge; sturdy planked and timbered bridge now stage, lookout, mountain rooftop where trains run no more: trainmen locked in iron cabins, deaf to the beauty that lay beneath the wheels of engines and carloads of faces and iron.

I have answered the call because you see tonight the moon announced that snow angels have taken leave, da Vinci’s Vitruvian ghosts of human form but better yet carrot noses of snow-rolled families were left to remind us they too once wintered here. And they will come again. Tomorrow, to the bugle call of geese and shrill-rattle of red-winged blackbirds, the flood tide of rising sun will burn through the shadows and drum to the rhythm of the lion and the lamb as the Ides will march in foot patrol with the parade of the leaving ice.