Surprised by What You Want

[Video above: “Rio,” by Hey Marseilles. Lyrics at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

Born Thirty Years Ago

Thirty years ago I was born into the world.
A thousand, ten thousand miles I’ve roamed,
By rivers where the green grass grows thick,
beyond the border where the red sands fly.
I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting,
I read books, I sang songs of history,
and today I’ve come home to Cold Mountain
to pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.

(Han-shan, Cold Mountain [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

(Frank O’Hara [source])

Finally, E.B. White writes of his efforts to soothe the soul of an elderly gander who’d recently lost his mate. In desperation, White checks out a brood of goslings in a friend’s care:

The goslings had the cheerful, bright, innocent look that all baby geese have. We scooped up three and tossed them into a box, and I paid Irving and carried them home.

My next concern was how to introduce these small creatures to their foster father, my old gander. I thought about this all the way home. I’ve had just enough experience with domesticated animals and birds to know that they are a bundle of eccentricities and crotchets, and I was not at all sure what sort of reception three strange youngsters would get from a gander who was full of sorrows and suspicions. (I once saw a gander, taken by surprise, seize a newly hatched gosling and hurl it the length of the barn floor.) I had an uneasy feeling that my three little charges might be dead within the hour, victims of a grief-crazed old fool. I decided to go slow. I fixed a makeshift pen for the goslings in the barn, arranged so that they would be separated from the gander but visible to him, and he would be visible to them. The old fellow, when he heard youthful voices, hustled right in to find out what was going on. He studied the scene in silence and with the greatest attention. I could not tell whether the look in his eye was one of malice or affection — a goose’s eye is a small round enigma. After observing this introductory scene for a while, I left and went into the house.

Half an hour later, I heard a commotion in the barnyard: the gander was in full cry. I hustled out. The goslings, impatient with life indoors, had escaped from their hastily constructed enclosure in the barn and had joined their foster father in the barnyard. The cries I had heard were his screams of welcome — the old bird was delighted with the turn that events had taken. His period of mourning was over, he now had interesting and useful work to do, and he threw himself into the role of father with immense satisfaction and zeal, hissing at me with renewed malevolence, shepherding the three children here and there, and running interference against real and imaginary enemies.

(E.B. White, “The Geese,” from Essays of E.B. White [source])

_____________________________

Note: Lyrics to the video which opens this post:

Rio
(Hey Marseilles)

Silhouette seasons and far-away reasons
are all I have now
Borders can keep me if Rio will have me
to dance and to drown
Take to the harbor like sails to set
Sleep for the evening in failed regret
Hold on to skylines of pale and coal
Clouds on horizons and love to grow old

On the way I will go
Where the days left to breathe
Are not gone, are still long
I am traveling on

Love is a hazard in lower Manhattan
You cannot escape, and mustn’t be saddened
By men who abandon your eyes for another’s
There are always Brazilian boys to discover

Set your sights straight now
Don’t forget pain
Drink ’til tomorrow becomes yesterday
Think of the shorelines you have yet to see
Men who will hold you with eyes you believe

On the way I will go
Where the days left to breathe
Are not gone, are still long
I am traveling on

On the way I will go
Where the days left to breathe
Are not gone, are still long
I am traveling on