All Text, Music, and Illustrations, including Paintings, Photographs, and 3D models, Copyright © 2022 by Jim Robbins.
MANGLED BRIDGE AND ROSY CROSS
Scrambling down a steep slope, I knelt before
an Ithuriel’s spear, a rattlesnake rippling
by my boot before I could even leap, lizards
scampering through dry leaves, the river crashing
through the canyon below me. Once I flew over
unstable stones in the river bottom, struggling
to keep up with my brother and our friends. Today
I surveyed each inch before even taking a step.
I found the skeletal steel frame of a washed-out bridge
clinging to a megalithic stone in the middle
of the river, and I remembered: Forty years ago,
a friend blurted out a story about a collapsed bridge,
and without another word we had dashed through
the river bottom to find it. That day I had felt clumsy
and weak (the first signs of chronic illness), and I
just couldn’t keep up. I had been ditched before
on a moonless night and in a cave, but never
abandoned in broad daylight. I was eleven
again, but I'd found the bridge and they hadn't.
Unlike them, I had continued to wander through a forest
of symbols, the bridge for a moment a ghastly symbol
of the past forty years. Somehow, I felt the same,
as if I had entered a timeless domain. Our fathers,
who had fished side by side that day,
both died a few years later. Forty years before
in this same river bottom, my Holy
Guardian Angel, my daimon, more than once,
had spoken to me of events to come, decades
in the future. Nonplussed, I had forgotten
the voice until the events transpired.
The perplexing, unpredictable angel
is only my soul, whose voice transcends
space and time, in this quiet river bottom
and in meditation. Today I closed my eyes,
a rose blooming in my mind's eye, at first
blood-red on a cross of splintery wood,
then the petals changing colors, each petal
representing a path on the Tree of Life,
the cross an unfolded cube of space
and time. I could have been anyone
these past forty years, and this forest
would have hardly changed, yet
the rose cross blooms inside me
and perhaps eternally abides, a symbol
of the soul in timeless grace, the river
lost in time until I opened my eyes again
as a snake was slithering between
dry, slowly curling hands.
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