Fiction: Another glass mountain

Somewhere in the vastness of the Reaper's Woods, which is said to reach to the very ends of the earth where the sun eats wayward children and the moon and stars hang in the trees like lamps, there is a glass mountain with sides so sheer and slippery none can climb it unassisted, that assistance when granted being either magical or a gift of nature, as in the case of virgin maidens who, according to legend, are able to slide up the mountain as easily as others slide down. Why would they want to do this? For some-- like Stepmother's fugitive daughter, for example, did she still qualify-- the mountain offers sanctuary, and not only from men and other earthly predators, but also from the disappointing impurity of the diurnal world, for the mountain in its lofty inaccessible beauty and crystalline transparency is the very emblem and embodiment of purity. As such it represents not merely escape but also transcendence, the desire for which is said to be the deepest of humankind's desires and the source of its strange magical systems.
Certainly it is a desire that often invades the hearts of those princes and ordinary mortals who aspire to surmount it. Their goal is ostensibly to rescue, or at least have a good time with, the beautiful maiden who, according to legend, resides all alone in the golden castle at the top, and for many, drawn by the seductive thrill of going where no man has gone before, the prospect of this conquest (some think of it as liberation) may be sufficient. But for those of a more soulful bent, there is also a need for illumination and self-understanding, which is to say, an understanding of the universe itself wherein for a short time one resides. Thus it is that the transcendent merges with the erotic and the manly in the heroic effort to pit one's strength and will against the mountain, to assail the unassailable. ...The quest, being impossible, draws wave after wave of brave seekers after love, honor, truth, and spiritual repose, thought to be attainable atop the glass mountain, where one is offered, so it is said, a contemplative view of the whole world and a life thereafter without cares, at least to the extent that bodies can be freed from cares.
Even at its base, visible or invisible, one experiences a great serenity, the mountain's untrammeled grandeur making the earth which bears it seem less an illusion, one's terrestrial passage less transient and insubstantial. Life's messy perplexities and sufferings (elsewhere, the story of the fugitive maiden and the royal princes-- as it must-- continues) fade away, as though absorbed into the pure luminous depths of the crystal mountain, wherein, like consciousness itself, all exists but as if it did not exist because one can see through it. And yet, for all that it attracts, it also, like all things pure, repels, for purity, unlike beauty, does not exist in the eye of the beholder but in the body of the beheld, quite apart from the awed self and all the dim ordinary things of the world, as if not a thing at all (this mountain, that maiden), but only its idea, something one can believe in, strive for, worship, but never know. Or love.
Although... it is transparent, the mountain ghostily reflects the striving climber in his perilous ascent, making him thus a witness to his own exertions. Which are strenuous. Even the gentler slopes near the base require great concentration, all one's strength, an indomitable will.... As the slope rises more sharply, however, even one's perspiring flesh turns against one, and what the climber sees in the mountain's dim reflection is a damp glittering brow and his own gathering despair. Yet most press on, gripping the mountain with their bodies, reaching for inch after inch, unwilling, like most mortals, to surrender to the inevitable. Which, being inevitable, arrives: the climber falls. Sometimes to his death, more often merely into humiliation, chagrin, lifelong desolation: to have glimpsed such grandeur and beauty but never to attain it.

- Coover, Robert. Stepmother. 45-48.

poetry: rose red

She never wanted the troll,

though, when freeing his beard
trapped in the bill of a circling bird,
when sliding her scissors through the soft
hairs at the nub of his chin, she did
think the shadow dropping from the gull's
wings lent his face a certain ugly interest.

She never wanted the prince's brother,

second prize to the elder, but just as vain,
with a woman's soft hips and hands,
surrounding himself with mirrors and liking
her sister better anyway, her indiscriminate
sweetness: an ordinary fruit ripening
in a bowl displayed on a public table.

And she did not want the bear

their mother invited next to the fire,
though his stinking fur could make
her eyes and mouth water. Once, she devised
a way to lie beside him, innocently
at first, then not so, curled behind him,
running her thumbnail down his spine.

What she wanted, of course, was her own place in the forest,

where she would take the flowering trees
that grew outside her mother's bedroom window -
one white, buxom with albino blossoms,

one red, smaller, with delicate, hooked thorns -
and plant them on opposite sides of her cottage,
watching each bloom fall as summer spoiled them.

- Erin Belieu, "Rose Red"

on failed ambitions and fairytales (marian engel)

Fishwives. Fishwidows. And we all set out to be mermaids.

- 104, Bear, Marian Engel

on failures and fairytales (sandra gilbert)

Then it was that little Gerda walked into the Palace, through the
great gates, in a biting wind.... She saw Kay, and knew him at once;
she flung her arms round his neck, held him fast, and cried, "Kay,
little Kay, have I found you at last?"

But he sat still, rigid and cold.

---Hans Christian Andersen, "The Snow Queen"

You wanted to know "love" in all its habitats, wanted
to catalog the joints, the parts, the motions, wanted
to be a scientist of romance: you said
you had to study everything, go everywhere,
even here, even
this ice palace in the far north.

You said you were ready, you'd be careful.
Smart girl, you wore two cardigans, a turtleneck,
furlined boots, scarves,
a stocking cap with jinglebells.
And over the ice you came, gay as Santa,
singing and bringing gifts.

Ah, but the journey was long, so much longer
than you'd expected, and the air so thin,
the sky so high and black.
What are these cold needles, what are these shafts of ice,
you wondered on the fourteenth day.
What are those tracks that glitter overhead?

The one you came to see was silent,
he wouldn't say "stars" or "snow,"
wouldn't point south, wouldn't teach survival.
And you'd lost your boots, your furs,
now you were barefoot on the ice floes, fingers blue,
tears freezing and fusing your eyelids.

Now you know: this is the place
where water insists on being ice,
where wind insists on breathlessness,
where the will of the cold is so strong
that even the stone's desire for heat
is driven into the eye of night.

What will you do now, little Gerda?
Kay and the Snow Queen are one, they're a single
pillar of ice, a throne of silence---
and they love you
the way the teeth of winter
love the last red shred of November.

- "The Last Poem About the Snow Queen," Sandra Gilbert

poetry: wooden potential, wake up! (randall jarrell)

At the back of the houses there is the wood.
While there is a leaf of summer left, the wood

Makes sounds I can put somewhere in my song,
Has paths I can walk, when I wake, to good

Or evil: to the cage, to the oven, to the House
In the Wood. It is a part of life, or of the story

We make of life. But after the last leaf,
The last light--for each year is leafless,

Each day lightless, at the last--the wood begins
Its serious existence: it has no path,

No house, no story; it resists comparison...
One clear, repeated, lapping gurgle, like a spoon

Or a glass breathing, is the brook,
The wood's fouled midnight water. If I walk into the wood

As far as I can walk, I come to my own door,
The door of the House in the Wood. It opens silently:

On the bed is something covered, something humped
Asleep there, awake there--but what? I do not know.

I look, I lie there, and yet I do not know.
How far out my great echoing clumsy limbs

Stretch, surrounded only by space! For time has struck,
All the clocks are stuck now, for how many lives,

On the same second. Numbed, wooden, motionless,
We are far under the surface of the night.

Nothing comes down so deep but sound: a car, freight cars,
A high soft droning, drawn out like a wire

Forever and ever--is this the sound that Bunyan heard
So that he thought his bowels would burst within him?--

Drift on, on, into nothing. Then someone screams
A scream like an old knife sharpened into nothing.

It is only a nightmare. No one wakes up, nothing happens,
Except there is gooseflesh over my whole body--

And that too, after a little while, is gone.
I lie here like a cut-off limb, the stump the limb has left...

Here at the bottom of the world, what was before the world
And will be after, holds me to its back

Breasts and rocks me: the oven is cold, the cage is empty,
In the House in the Wood, the witch and her child sleep.

- "The House in the Woods" by Randall Jarrell