Meredith
Stricker
Paradise — a thin line
Every morning opening the newspaper,
I am faced
with the thin line that divides disaster and
deprivation
from a world of luminous wealth. Tuesday, January
29th,
for instance, bodies, many of them children,
lie on the ground.
They drowned in the canal trying to escape
a weapons depot fire
and explosion in Lagos. Their heads are twisted
in straw and dust
near the feet of wailing on-lookers. And across
two thin-as-breath
lines: a cocktail shaker, the same size as
a body in the foreground,
gleams quietly for $950 in stenciled silver,
reflecting nothing
in its lucent surface, a vast unclaimed territory
full of minerals,
wide open for our projections of luxe, tradition,
glamorous
occasions. I have learned to compartmentalize,
to mentalize.
I can tell the silver shaker is beautiful,
in its way,
but to see it glisten there separately, something
strange
has to happen to my sight. There are bodies
on the ground,
there is a pristine cocktail shaker and two
infinitely thin,
poignant lines. The cocktail shaker levitates
to the foreground.
It is untouched by the chaos, the loss, the
weeping, the wet bodies,
the smoldering munitions. Heaven, I believe,
would restore
our sight. Earthly paradise would dissolve
the lines.
•
Heaven is not a gated community. Silver is
covered with mud.
Mud is covered with silver. The wounded are
cared for, are made
whole. The dead are washed and mourned. We
would leave
nothing out. Not one atom of existence is outcast.
“Parts of the canal were blanketed
with water hyacinths.
A woman’s pink shoe, a baby’s slipper
and a bright orange
and red skirt floated among the plants.”
This is earth. This is paradise — how
one grain of paradise looks
on a day in January. We are its eyes.
Meredith Stricker is the author of Alphabet
Theater, a collection of performance
poetry from Wesleyan, and Tenderness Shore through
the National Poetry Series. In visual art and
poetry, she is interested in the cusp of language
and drawing.
back
|
