The bridge that is paradox

It seems like a paradox exists between hope and change.  Actually, it appears more like a rope bridge between the two – linked by cross pieces and knotted ropes holding it all together.  The connection strong but over a tenuous territory. Maybe it’s about hope and chance and luck has everything to do with it.  This is what an old friend told me once.  She is my mentor too.  So I listen.

I imagine walking across this bridge as I would an Adirondack path.  Danger in each vibration and all that holds me to the world is a tenuous connection between rope and rock. Now I’m thinking, “What is a paradox after all?  A dock on either side of the abyss.”  Nothing in the middle making sense but when you come from one side to the other, how right, if unconsidered before.  What is a paradox?  A new partner, an unexpected guest, a friend’s revelation, a new friend after a personal holocaust when a moment before, it would seem, nothing would grow, as if salt on the ground at Nineveh? For all I know Nineveh is now an orchard where oranges bright as dice pulse pectin through their thick skin.  Oranges turn their colors in the night.  Imagine the desert illuminated by these juicy globes.  Who would have thought such sweet light would cast shadows on these wretched plains?

In the crevasse between left brain and right you’ll find the jump, the spilt milk of synapses, the positive charge of hope connecting through the gray matter, the knotted rope bridges within our skulls, to the other side, where the negatively charged chance waits; pausing at the edge, a hopeful caesura, which is the poet’s way of saying, “Stop – but don’t, stop.”

When Lynn was little, she was certain, as she came upon an abandoned lot surrounded by a metal fence in the Bronx, that she had discovered the Iron Curtain.  She also moved towards the wall when in bed to leave room for God, who was probably very tired and needed a place to rest his head.  And, she once told me about the time she ran home from school to check the oven to make sure God wasn’t dead because she was told that day that God was everywhere. Decades later, her stories give me hope in innocence; faith in what freedom from prejudice can bring – compassion, caring, simple worries about mighty beings.  Hope often seems tenuous when we ache for the tangible. The other night I felt my mother’s hands in mine.  It was completely unexpected.

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a blue streak about white bricks

The red bricks were painted white. An old kind of white paint mixed and rolled on the bricks before paints had so many names and stores competed with artist pen sets for all the colors one can find on a palette.  Milky white, white before the crystal shines through it; off white, egg shell, satin white, oyster. Every expression of color a competition for how mozzarella will tickle your tongue or niacin will creep through your blood and itch your neck. Any clam shell she had ever seen was white like a clam shell; not like milk; or every broken wave lighting white when the sun was at three or four o’clock and set to focus on the breakers like a spotlight. Rolling white and roaring white, as the blue green wave rolled through. It is not the water that moves but the energy through it.  Every wave is an illusion of movement; as if the water is moving from one area to another. The Indian Ocean eventually coming to the Jersey shore and every wetland on the coast holding something of the Mediterranean and the Aegean within. The Pacific, one Jupiter-sized ocean, carrying every river and Lake Baikal from Russia, even water off the deep sturgeon and all of it rolling into every otter’s paws like a cabbage of energy, that is really, layers and layers of energy and detritus of many oceans and currents, rolling into their paws or filtered through the feathery gills of baby clams.  Every leaf a wrack line and watermark from the Yangtze, the Yellow or the Seine rivers.  Why not bring Paris into it? After all, those kicks of the Follies surely moved the air and birds’ preening feathers loose caught this wind and moved onto the Seine and into the ocean and through the currents, rolling, rolling to the Jersey shore. Why not?  Or the Danube, blue dancing on the edges of the red cabbage. Well, where else would that blue come from except the Danube?  Dancing on the red cabbage like the white moths touched by yellow but owned by the air and moving through space, time and energy to your garden.  Wave and crest, colonies of Monarchs, moving through time’s patterns since their own generation did not make the crossing but left it to cascades of sparrows to wing through the air, stir up the cosmos and move the whole pilgrimage along the curve of energy, the ladle of abbondanza, the plenty crowding out of the great Horn and all of it, ending in the colors of the evening, the deeper blues before the dark, the warmer reds, the sweet colors of skin with summer on their nets and the lunar curve of children’s calves and thighs walking through the sand; small sprays of grains whisking past their toes, as one or maybe more look back for the dolphins, always ready to come to the surface when you’re not looking; always there the day before when you should have been.  The summer feeling like always.