The Geese That Stay on the Water

There is a particular kind of tenderness in a bridge that has been retired from footsteps but left in the water.

Across the clear stream between two moss banks, eleven slabs of reddish-brown volcanic stone sit in the staggered chevron of a flock of wild geese banking across the sky. Each slab is hewn into the rough six-sided curve of a tortoise shell, so that a single crossing quietly joins two old emblems of longevity: the crane-like echelon of migrating geese overhead and the tortoise enduring in the current below.

For two hundred years, everyone who walked the garden stepped from shell to shell across the water. Because the red mountain stone is porous and soft, all those shoes and wooden sandals slowly dished the center of every slab into a shallow cradle. Eventually the stones grew thin enough that the gardeners tied a low crossbar of bamboo and black palm twine at the edge of the moss bank—not to take the bridge away, but to let it rest.

I wanted to paint the bridge in its second life on an October morning: the worn hollows holding crescents of rainwater and fallen scarlet maple leaves, two koi passing unhurriedly through the shadow underneath, and high in the pale gold mist above the pines, a real flock of geese borrowing the formation on their way south.