At 6:05 p. m. on Wednesday, August 1, 2007, the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis collapsed. Thirteen people were killed.

Thirteen. On Lammas Eve.

Of many rivers, it is said that they require a life every year. The Mississippi, our “strong brown god” (Tom Eliot) takes many more than that. Last year, here in the metro alone, it was 17.

In the old days, they say, they used to offer to rivers. Nowadays, we mostly don't. But the sacrifices continue, as they will while ever the world endures. Willing or unwilling, they offer themselves, because sacrifice is in the nature of things.

Minneapolis, spanning the Mississippi, is a City of Bridges. Bridges are uncanny places, betwixt and between, neither here nor there. Maybe that's why in folklore they're so often associated with the Horned One—excuse me, the Devil—the “Lord of the In-Between” (Cei Serith). They say that every bridge claims a life in the building: foundation sacrifice. They say that the first to cross a newly-built bridge belongs to Himself. In the old days, they'd drive a dog across first. Or maybe that's just a story.

The bridge from which we sing the Sun up on Midwinter's morning every year is the self-same bridge from which poet John Berryman leapt to his death in 1972. Surely a bridge dyed red with the blood of a poet will stand for long and long.

The world itself, the ancestors said, is founded, premised, on sacrifice, being on the premise of non-being, and He of the Horns Himself both Offering and Offerant: god of the spanning in-between, foundation sacrifice of the world.