Raw pine and antlers, a few skins. This room, its dusty windows claimed by cottonwoods that shine more than full-grown sunflowers, leaves smooth as persimmon. Under them, sheep shed lanolin and scat on the low breeze.
We walk downstream. Leaves float under the wide-timbered bridge like water-lanterns. We smooth the river beach with our hands and sit.
Until a bulb-nosed truck stops mid-bridge, a tight noon-shadow of gray-green metal, pitted-chrome bumper. Side panels crumpled like monstrous skin. Its engine-greased pulse builds to imminent explosion.
Who drives the bald cab? Whose fist pounds the hood? It doesn’t really matter. We walk like giants. When we were children, he shoved our faces in mud, counted to 100, but we are older, and made like a suspension bridge, to flex and persist over smother, even in high winds.