The Bridge – Elizabeth Kandall, PhD
The Bridge
Come with me friend, in these days when we feel far apart
When what is allowed must be questioned – come with me
on a walk across the Brooklyn bridge. It’s early June, we
start on the Manhattan side, wear sandals or sneakers and lipstick
for the air is full of height and words and longing. In Pocket Park
we’ll ready ourselves, listen past the traffic, the city sounds hear
Marianne Moore call, Come Flying! She beckons, out across the river
from friendship, from necessity. We’ll come flying! On the first landing
it’s windy and hard to hear – an obstacle, a broken string in the harp,
a pearl necklace without a thread, a dangerous place where doubt
can get in. Poetry has a wide warm embrace but I’ve also felt
her cold back. Doubt can happen anywhere, so when you can’t hear
can’t follow and the drop is steep – Wait, there I’ve heard an angel’s message
a miraculous line, beyond the cacophony I heard “there is no turning back”
and using that instruction, I keep going. Let’s walk grateful for steps
for cement, for shoes for the miracle of words, like the bike locks along
the fence, to keep walking is the way forward. We are almost to Brooklyn side. Can you
hear water lapping, boats passing, Whitman asking what is it then
between us? Hear the call to enter a place from which our lives are carried
and unfurled backward and forward, our listening fine-tuned and open
like the dusk-lit panorama of the city we just came from, right before us,
or like the flexible spine of a book bent back for reading.
Elizabeth Kandall
- Elizabeth Kandall, PhD, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice. She is a student of Zen Buddhism at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. She is enrolled in a low-residency MFA in poetry from the Queens University program in creative writing, and she serves on the board of directors at Poets House.
- Email: elizabethkandallphd@gmail.com
Photo credit: Velleda C. Ceccoli, Phd