Not a straight flush

I participate in a couple of online communities having to do with usability and design for people, and in one of them a current topic is affordances for bathroom fixtures. This reminded me of when I first started going to Italy and found the vast number of different ways of mechanisms for flushing toilets there. There's the pull chain, from above, the pushbutton on top of the tank, the lever in the wall above the WC, the foot-activated button on the floor, the button in the wall, etc. etc., and last (but not least, because there are twenty-gazillion types) the lever on the tank. This inspired me to write the following:

How do I flush thee? Let me count the ways.
I flush thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight...

That's as far as I got... maybe someday I'll finish it.

(It comes accompanied, of course, with a visual — a demonstration of an arm reaching out of sight.)

Partial poem copyright © 2007, Elizabeth Buie, with apologies to a much earlier Elizabeth