Blood Under The Bridge Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

I had never been to the country before,
had never visited the wild in the wood;
but one foggy eve, with the dew on my sleeve,
I arose with the conviction that I should.
The night air was as cold as a witch’s tit,
and the moon had narrowed into a cat’s eye.
I didn’t care, as branches caught in my hair,
like knotty fingers reaching out of the sky.

The grass was slippery-smooth beneath my feet.
I had to be careful crossing over hill;
but I just had to get there, somehow, somewhere,
where something beckoned to me, silent and still.
I knew there was something but didn’t know what,
like a note hidden in the back of a book.
I just had to get it, could not forget it,
and I was determined to get me a look.

I walked through an alcove of alder and ash.
The catkins lengthened for each conical maid;
and I swore in that moment to end the torment
by trudging onward to that beckoning glade.
The wind it whispered with a wistful woo,
and the shivers clambered like vines up my back.
I felt too small to resist the ghostly call
that lured me onward around the verdant track.

Beyond the clearing, I saw an old stone bridge
arching its back across the River de Rayne;
and in that place, I saw the loveliest face,
whose beauty hovers in the back of my brain.
She was dressed in swirls of the gathering mist,
like a nightgown that she might claim as her own;
and her delicate skin, like fine porcelain,
stretched like velvet across alabaster bone.

Her hair cascaded from a waterfall braid,
like the fall of night through the trees overhead;
and when she turned to see, looking right at me,
I wanted to run but was rooted instead.
For, her eyes were as vast as the universe;
and her demure smile had the wickedest curl.
I cannot bear the memory of that stare,
that shot from the eyes of that poor murdered girl!

When she looked at me, there were stones in her mouth
crushing her voice beneath the weight of the years;
but I was spun back in time, like a spinning dime,
in the long strand of her tumultuous tears.
A storm of leaves was rustling in her hair.
The clouds were caliginous in heaven’s bed.
Her dress was too thin, the rain soaked through to skin;
and she ran through the shadows that draped her head.

She was midway across the old stony bridge
when something strange made her stop dead in her tracks.
From within her eyes, I saw two creatures rise,
with iridescent wings upon their gnarled backs.
They pounced upon her with their razor-sharp claws,
slicing through her skin as though an onion peel;
and with a final breath, she fell to her death
in the River de Rayne, which glistened like steel.

That unblinking eye in the sky saw it all.
She lay there broken among the jagged stones.
Her hair broke in waves over watery graves
that stilled the shiver that clattered in her bones.
She looked at me, and I grew pale as the moon.
The world seemed lonelier than it was before.
Both love and despair were braided in my hair
as the River de Rayne lapped against the shore.