I learned to cross by building what I crossed, a narrow bridge
laid plank by plank until belief acquired weight.
Nothing opens without asking first for a threshold,
nothing moves without agreeing to the current,
nothing stands unless it submits to measure,
nothing returns unchanged from its own echo.
What you throw forward comes back shaped as echo,
testing the joints you trusted in the bridge.
Not all distances consent to the same measure;
some bends hold; others learn to shed their weight.
The body learns the price of swimming a current,
the mind learns where it hesitates at the threshold.
Every crossing invents a private threshold:
step too soon and hear the warning echo,
step too late and be taken by the current.
Between them, you suspend a working bridge
that flexes under borrowed weight,
checked only by the eye’s imperfect measure.
We call it balance when the measure holds,
even as doubt keeps widening the threshold.
The span is quiet but remembers weight;
wood keeps the weather of every echo.
What carries you is not the name bridge,
but attention angled against the current.
Get Krlinsner’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Attention is learned by moving with the current,
counting loss until it teaches measure.
You stop demanding certainty from the bridge,
stop pretending fear isn’t a threshold.
Each step leaves a thinner echo,
each return carries less unowned weight.
At last you walk with, not against, the weight,
letting effort braid itself into the current.
The past still speaks, but softer, an echo
kept proportional by honest measure.
You don’t conquer the final threshold;
you maintain it, like a living bridge.
Envoi
Stand on the bridge and feel the weight you chose to bear.
Name the threshold, then listen to the current that answers.
Trust the measure that quiets the echo.
Author’s note: This poem was written under fixed formal constraints to explore what remains when choice, attention, and responsibility cannot be revised away.
Kind Loric
