from
the sea (5) by freda karpf
The red bricks that
formed the base of Mrs. Scattergood’s cottage 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 the artist’s palette.
Milky white, white before the crystal shines through it; off white, egg
shell, satin white, oyster. The white of fresh mozzarella, taken from the
brine, tickles your tongue that was the white bricks for her. She saw them. She
felt them. Any clam shell she had ever seen was white like a clam shell; not
like milk. Every broken wave’s white, when the sun was at three or four o’clock
and set to focus on the breakers like a spotlight, was that white. No other.
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 comes to the Jersey shore and every wetland on the
coast holds something of the Mediterranean and the Aegean within. The Jupiter-sized
Pacific, carries every river, including Lake Baikal, from Russia, even water
off the deep sturgeon and all of it rolls into every otter’s paw 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 the small coquina clams. Every
leaf a part of the 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.
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