tales of adventure and woe, and thoughful essays on winter: coming soon

Fountain

The scene is Brooklyn Museum Plaza, Saturday night, the third of the month, chilly out, low 50s, a slight breeze, jackets and scarves. I’m carrying a book (James Agee) and notebook a pen a scarf a new bottle of wine my heavy limbs and cigarettes and a desire to watch the fountain.

Fountain: at night, like this, is an epiphany. It’s eight pm and kids everywhere are screaming, running up and down the steps of the Brooklyn Museum, parents watching from below. A man in white sweats and cornrows films the fountain, films the children, and raps intermittently about exorcism (?)

The Fountain: lit from below gold lights the water, unless the streams are high enough to reach the silver of the street lamp; they become just that, gold and silver jets, that break at top stride into a form, sea jellies, silver from below, and die golden breaking down upon their own gold tendrils. Each drop an orb, glistening in golden light, full and round and sparkling as only at night and by unnatural light.

It plays, skillfully, shoots up high and higher, so that our bodies, the water in our bodies too reaches up into heaven, shouts with the joy of pure living breathing coldness shiver, the arch and ache of stars ahead and invisible pullings, the string that lifts the chest! and too suddenly urgings all gone as the water slams down into its concrete bed; the playful little jumps the fountain gives just inches from the ground, the teasing, and the cocked fire loud gunshot leaps that so suddenly startle; hard to remember that this is man-made, man designed, but of course?

Who else? How else? How else so stirred, the souls that silent watch the water’s flight and fall? Who else, but other breathing human minds themselves searching out the constellations above, to stir us so?

The fountain:

People come to pouring water

as though it will offer,

in its simplicity, a revelation.

It does—

continuously.

A man, standing waist-deep,

stares at the moving tower.

He would dive into the stream

if he could—

become a million liquid particles

in a circulating seam.

I think of young Werther

who, when he helped a girl lift

a jug of water to her head,

gave her his short life, smelling of

earthenware, rounded as riverbed stones

to carry slowly home.