The Bridge of Unspoken Hues
A painter cloaked in twilight’s ashen shroud,
His palette choked with colors unbestowed—
A symphony of silence, loud, so loud.
The bridge, a gnarled spine o’er river’s breath,
Groaned under rain’s relentless silver scourge;
Each drop a needle stitching life to death,
As shadows pooled where forgotten memories converge.
A figure emerged—no, drifted—from the mist,
Her tattered shawl a wraith of midnight’s loom,
Hair like cobwebs where the moonlight kissed,
Eyes twin voids where unborn sorrows bloom.
“What seeks thy brush,” she whispered, “in this drear?”
Her voice, a wind through willows’ burdened boughs,
“The world’s soul,” he breathed, “to make it clear—
A truth that dances just beyond my vows.”
She laughed—a sound like cracking porcelain—
And raised a hand where raindrops dared not land.
“I’ll show thee beauty carved from mortal pain,
If thou wilt paint what none may understand.”
Her fingers traced the air; the fog unfurled
To reveal a face within the river’s flow—
His own, yet not, a youth long lost to world,
Drowned in depths where sunless currents go.
For seven nights, beneath the bridge they met,
While autumn’s rot perfumed the sodden air.
He painted visions drenched in vain regret—
Her lips, her hands, her death-cold midnight hair.
“Why trembles thy brush?” she’d murmur, drawing near,
Her breath frost-blooms on canvas yet undone.
“I fear,” he gasped, “this art that tastes like fear—
These shades that bleed as though my soul they spun.”
On the eighth eve, the river roared in flood,
Its maw agape with secrets long entombed.
She pressed a locket to his palm—cold, crude—
“A token from when my heart still beat and bloomed.”
Inside, a child’s face smiled through rusted years,
Two siblings framed in sepia’s tender lie.
His breath caught—memory’s knife, sharp and sheer—
A sister lost to waves, to why, to why…
The specter wailed—a sound to crack the earth—
Her form unspun to water, ash, and rue.
“I sought thee through the veil of second birth—
Our bond outlives the grave, yet knew’st not true!”
He lunged to grasp the shreds of fading night,
But river’s claws ensnared his desperate feet.
The bridge watched, mute, as brother and lost light
Embraced the dark where art and anguish meet.
Dawn found the canvas dry beneath the span—
A masterpiece of shadows intertwined,
Two faces merged as rivers merge with sand,
A truth too late unearthed, too cruel, too kind.
The locket gleams where reeds now kiss the shore,
Its rust outlives the hands that once held fast.
The bridge still weeps the name it can’t restore—
A requiem in rain, for what’s long passed.
“`
