They call this Susquehanna, the long hour of shadows. How the sun draws its red tail across banks and the night evens out the bridge's rough surface. I have been here all day wading between rocks, casting for the gray muscle of bass and now the leap and splash as their wide mouths slap dragonflies from the air. Stars open on the bright water like white eyes.
Bats tumble from the bridge like clumsy acrobats saving themselves in mid-fall.
Sometimes when I come here the water bundles up around my legs, pulling me past the rapids, past the bridge, along the cliff where ospreys nest. Sometimes I think of my wife just getting home from work, or my dead infant son accepting the stiff embrace of tree roots and how I live with this, how I slough my cold skin into the water, how I hear the cars above me and the people who will never wet their hands from the soft edge of a bank. They call this evening, as if the rough ends of our lives become smooth for a moment, as if the darkness moves across the land like a river, rounding over every rock and point it comes to. Finally, like always I end up at the shore shaking out my waders and cutting the bass in the cold moonlight. Entrails spill into the rippling weeds then follow out their route with the current and the waiting bellies of catfish.