Liberating Desire

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.