The Rock of Yr Gladness, the Bright Uselessness of Joyful Endeavors

[Image: “Smile,” by user apionid on Flickr.com. The photographer offers this explanation there: “I’ve been reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Moriarty. He’s really perturbed by the whole Cheshire cat thing.”]

From whiskey river:

Why I Am Happy

Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
That lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.

And I know where it is.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

To drive out Angry Thoughts
(excerpt)

Whatever anyone does,
anyone says, in the
past, now, everything, let
it bounce off the rock
of yr gladness (yr mirror)

(Jack Kerouac [source])

…and:

To Begin With, the Sweet Grass
(excerpt)

3.

The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.

Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.
It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It’s more than the beating of the single heart.
It’s praising.
It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe still another.

6.

Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—your life—
what would do for you?

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

I submit here, this brief. Pulled as it is out of thin air, pulled from the place where that-which-we-didn’t-know-we-knew abides. Where so much gathers in a rich miasma until called forth by luck, competition (the aforementioned memos were very good), an impulse to sketch, itchiness for form, abundance of love for an object, a drive to give small things their due, or the weight of a personal collection piling up, asserting its presence. I submit this memo, whose true subject is both a founding tenet and sustaining goal of the whole operation I’m running here, a subject which bears repeating at times of reorganization, challenging times of uncertainty and instability, lest we forget it; the bright uselessness of joyful endeavors.

(Lia Purpura [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Gift

I wanted to thank the mockingbird for the vigor of his song.
Every day he sang from the rim of the field, while I picked
blueberries or just idled in the sun.
Every day he came fluttering by to show me, and why not, the white
blossoms in this wings.
So one day I went there with a machine, and played some songs of
Mahler.
The mockingbird stopped singing, he came close and seemed to
listen.
Now when I go down to the field, a little Mahler spills through the
sputters of his song.
How happy I am, lounging in the light, listening as the music floats
by!
And I give thanks also for my mind, that thought of giving a gift.
And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Deposition on Failure

Last May, I remember, on this very sidewalk: a fly’s soap-bubble, gasoline colors; taut grimace on the face of a baby bird, that hatched and unliving, ancient, pimpled bud on the grass; corms of daylilies, and “corm” itself that most perfect union of “corn” and “worm,” meaning exactly the thick, stubborn grub I hacked to separate. I remember the ripe, raw, shivery scents.

But during this thaw, come on so fast now—just for a day, just for caprice, it was 60 degrees.

And when I went out walking and the sun was so soft—an assertion, bravura. Where warmth thawed the planes of bone like a high bank, my face was a running stream again. I took off my mittens and left them in the crook of a tree; it always takes a few days to believe the warmth.

The snow receded, the warmth returned, and I was fine. I was negative. Negative, negative, I was thinking, buoyant. The hard winter lifted all at once, the sun came, dewy and beading, the air was sweet and I was fine—oh burgeoning cliché I entertained, cannot believe I entertained: spring bearing its blood-tide and life all abloom, all’s well ending well in a spate, a thrall of undulant weather, et cetera. Rising, on cue, such music as dripping icicles conduct, such shine and promise, oh window of light on the nibbled Red Delicious little Sam just dropped. And the neighbors’ voices carrying, the out-of-doors voices lofting, reconfiguring again the space between our houses: it was New World Symphony, English horn-solo-fresh. I was a turning season, a spit of land at low tide, a window thrown open. Would you believe it if I told you (told unto you, lo! for real) I saw a butterfly—and it was corn-yellow? I resisted the easy convergence—spring, warmth, I’m fine—not a bit, and I knew that to be an indulgence, a failure, partial sight. As if I had come to the brightness of that day wholly—wholly—from dark.

But I cannot forget, for this is a deposition, that all that dark week there was this, too: the diamond-blue light at each drift’s core. My husband’s abundant embrace. Sanctum of my child under quilts. In candlelight, sewing the ghost. Folding a swan. With books, in the folds of a story. Our son, himself, that most beloved unfolding.

And the color of the sky: workshirt-turned-inside-out, and the gray of our house against it, a darker inner seam, revealed. Our house an object that light chose for lavishing, a river stone eddied into calm. The tender crack in a baking loaf, its creamy rift rough at the edges and going gold. Of all the names for snow considered, of all the shifts in tone it made, I found clamshell, bone, and pearl. That week I found lead in the white, mouse in it, and refracted granite. Talc with pepper. Layers of dried mud, zinc, and iron. Blown milkweed and ashy cinder. Silvered cornfield. Uncooked biscuit. Mummy, oatmeal, sand, and linen. Some morning glory. Some roadside aster.

(Lia Purpura [source])