I
hope this abstract essay will have meaning for all who read and serve as the
last piece of summer before out attention turns to the structure of the Fall
semester.
Liberating Desire
On a small but
worn shelf in my mind there is a landscape with green pasture and blue ski. A
tiny stream flows from south to north and I walk down the bank of that stream.
The split rail fence to my right is sun-worn and the un-sanded boards threaten
splinters. I like to sit on them anyway, to feel their roughness, the grain of
the wood; the knots are smooth from the oil of my hands.
From
the perch atop the triangular rail of the fence, my gaze lies upon miles of
green grass laying down like a carpet for my eyes that travel to the mountains
in the west. There is still snow in the bowls.
But
it is closer, just across the stream on the west bank, where I buried my
desire. Night after night I buried it there. Was it my shame that dictated the
depth of the hole? I cannot remember now.
In
a pile of what seemed like ashes, I placed my desire, like fertilizer in the
rich black soil. Watered by tears, the nutrients permeated the pores as the
larger pieces of my heart were caught and held fast by the filtration. The
urgency with which I worked could only have grown from a shame for simply
feeling a thirst that I knew I could never quench. But I dug until I bled for
at least the physical pain was preferable to living without touching you.
Strange
that I never look east; in my shelf, in my mind, I do not think there is an
east.
I
cannot remember when I began visiting the little shelf in my mind more often
than the more distant but larger shelf: the halls where everything sexual was
allowed. When I was young, the red carpet on the steps on this shelf was worn
thin and each room held a different pleasure. And while shame was not gone, it
was distant, it did not know how to find the door to the shelf. I was safe and
in the moment of pleasure, shame seemed further away.
But
the large shelf is dusty now; the door is stuck and I cannot find anyone in the
rooms.
I
visited the west bank where I buried my desire nearly every night. I thought,
more often than not, that it would not stay there. Perhaps it would leap back
into my loins when I least expected. But it did not. And, one day, when the sun
was brightest and the mountains in the distance seemed closest to my heart, I
realized that a tree had begun to grow. Right there, there where I buried my
desire. And then it grew quickly; a thin trunk with pale, modeled and bumpy bark
curled from the fertilized ground. Leaves unfurled and the drooping weeping
willow began to thrive, for desire is freedom and the mess of unbridled growth
is the antithesis of sterility.
Soon
I could lie in the shade of the tree with my head at the base of a V formed by
two bold roots that ventured unexposed almost halfway down to the stream. Here
I could feel my desire; it was still buried but it was no longer trapped for it
was a solute in the xylem, deposited within the fibrous network of the very
polymers that form the structure of life.
On
the sunniest days, when my head rests in the V and eyelids shield my vision, I
can feel you both next to me. Together, on the small shelf in my mind, we fly
to the mountains where the snow in the bowls melts; it brings water to the soil
in which my desire will forever nurture the weeping tree.
