Magnificent Asparagus Fountain

The care with which the rain is
wrong and the green is wrong and
the white is wrong, the care with
which there is a chair and
plenty of breathing.  The care with
which there is incredible justice
and likeness, all this makes
a magnificent asparagus, and
also a fountain.

---Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

To be brief, Stein's off-beat allusion to material objects, weather, colors, foods, bodily functions, and domestic work in this ground-breaking collection of poetry conveys the excitement and pleasure of possession in its deepest and most intangible sense. Vitality! 

[Side note:  observe Stein's use of the word care.  See also this entry, HERE]

A Circular Staircase

Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

---Linda Pastan,  excerpted from the poem "The Five Stages of Grief" reprinted in On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays (Eds. Richard Reynolds and John Stone)

In this wry, and a certain points, satiric poem Linda Pastan exposes the less clinical side of the experience of grief.  I selected this poem because its final lines manage to convey the feeling of futility--the sisyphean experience of grief.  One vicariously senses not only circularity but falling down the staircase.  Here is the poem in full:

The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after an amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two.  I passed you the toast--
you sat there.  I passed
you the paper--you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining.  What can I exchange
for you?  The silence
after storms?  My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string.  In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles of sleep.  I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing
thought my feet slip on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards:  Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting,
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of.  Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

Dream House Part III: Cliff-Dwellings

"The moon was up, though the sun hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes.  The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level.  The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow.  I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up.  The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern.  In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light.  When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pinons along the edge of the top ledges.  The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water."

---Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)

In this scene from Cather's novel of modern life, The Professor's House (1925), the orphaned cowhand, Tom, describes the enchanting cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde.  Once inhabited by the Anasazi Indians, these dwellings have remained untouched for centuries, preserved as if in "amber" by the sun and the dry climate.   In Tom's account, he narrates his discovery of the dwellings and the amateurish archaeological project that he, his friend Roddy, and their housekeeper, Henry, pursue in the hope that the Smithsonian will take an interest in their findings.   When Tom returns to the Mesa following an unsuccessful trip to Washington, he discovers that Roddy has sold the artifacts to a German trader. After a bitter feud, Tom evicts Roddy and remains on the mesa for a solitary summer.  

This particular scene follows the loss of the men's friendship, their idealized family housekeeping-museum project, and the loss of the relics.  Tom's description of these homes from a position below  is one of the most vivid passages within the novel, and its detail and splendor suggests an oneiric home.  The dismantling of the idealized or utopian home is a modern conceit for Cather, and this story is set within a longer story about (in the simplest sense) the loss of cultural meaning in the 1920s.  Yet the intensity and purity of Tom's final experience on the mesa resonates with our very contemporary longing for wholeness and well-being.  As Tom discerns, the unadulterated happiness he experiences in these final months will only be temporary.  In a similar way, while we strive for happiness (almost as if it were a state that could be attained or sustained for any length of time) such moments are likely to be unpredictable and fleeting--something we grasp from a distance, in a flash of quickly changing color and light.

Iridescent

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler.  The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine.  That does occur in nature, but it is rare.  When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river.  It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair.  It did look like a birth or a resurrection.  For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection.  I've always loved to baptize people,  though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."

---Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

Sunlit raindrops (and hummingbirds and opal rings) embody the fancy and wonder we attribute to childhood. Baptism, of course, is a renewal of the human spirit--the process of beginning again.  I love the gentleness of this passage.  But most of all, I appreciate its seriousness in praising the sprinkler for its production of rainbows rather than for its hydration of plants.