Not Exactly What You Had in Mind

[Image: promotional photo for Later the Same Evening, a one-act opera about five paintings by Edward Hopper. In this photograph, Hotel Room (also shown below) is the third painting from the left.]

From whiskey river:

Dark Pines Under Water

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

(Gwendolyn MacEwen [source])

…and:

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus…

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Baghdad Theatre one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

(Donald Miller [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room

While the man is away
telling his wife
about the red-corseted woman,
the woman waits
on the queen-sized bed.
You’d expect her quiet
in the fist of a copper
statue. Half her face,
a shade of golden meringue,
the other half, the dark
of cattails. Her mouth even—
too straight, as if she doubted
her made decision, the way
women do. In her hands,
a yellow letter creased,
like her hunched back.
Her dress limp on a green chair.
In front, a man’s satchel
and briefcase. On a dresser,
a hat with a ceylon
feather. That is all
the artist left us with,
knowing we would turn
the woman’s stone into ours,
a thirst for the self
in everything—even
in the sweet chinks
of mandarin.

(Victoria Chang [source])

…and:

Porcupine at Dusk

Out of the bunch grass
out of the cheat grass
a bunch of grass waddles
my way.

Quill-tips bleached by winter four
inches down: crown of glory dark
at the roots: a halo
catching the sun’s
final song:

No way could such steady
oblivion possibly live
up to legend, whatever
fear I might have had
is gone, but still I stop

Short on my after-dinner walk, no
collision course if I
can help it, thinking
at first it’s the wind,
nudging a path out of the field

Or one of a covey of tumbleweed
lost like those today on the freeway,
racing ahead of my car that whole long drive
here to the banks of the Snake, to friends
so close they know
when to leave me alone.

As though I were nowhere around, the porcupine
shuffles the edge of the road,
in five minutes crosses
a distance I could have covered
in less than one

And disappears at last into cattails
and rushes, sunset, a vespers
of waterbirds, leaving me
still unwilling to move.

I am a sucker for scenes like this.
The slowest beauty can rush me.
And here I am,
all of my defenses down.

(Ingrid Wendt [source])

…and:

It’s my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.

(Roy Blount, Jr. [source])

As we do more and more of our shopping online and via more old-fashioned mail order channels, like catalogues, some of the thrill has gone out of impulse buying. There’s the unavoidable lag time, y’know, between buying whatever and enjoying it. Buyer’s remorse has evolved into an entire neurosis, stretching out over upcoming days instead of confined to the few minutes of guilt after we step from the the store. Retailers and parcel-shipping services are doing what they can to acknowledge the drawbacks, and fix them. Next-day shipping, right? (And now, I hear, Amazon plans to open local distribution centers: on selected goods you’ll be able to get same-day delivery.)

But really, we could just avoid the whole problem if we simply already had what we wanted, before being forced deciding to buy it…