on desire

You might have, as a pensive child long ago, looked for your lover. You thought you found her many times in the charming faces of all those girls. Even before enzymes and secretions gave you biological permission, you would languish in erotic dreams, awake or asleep. Tirelessly, you sought that princess from whom the Mystery saw fit to separate you. No, she wasn't any of those giddy girls, pretty as they were. Even as a pensive child long ago, you discerned her out there somewhere else, beyond the frosty chill of a Dixie morning. Maybe even beyond the time of your living.

That night parking in the backwoods and fumbling toward carnal release, you had forgotten your mystic lover. Those hot strikes of lightning as you sweated with another ran through you and melted you, blending you into the mundane earth. Years fly, and carnality wanes. Until you are drunk that night, puking and alone, leaning miserably against someone's back tire. Inside, the others are dancing and laughing. A darling appears, like a sad angel, to join you on the reeking ground. She doesn't know you, but she puts an arm around you. Is she, at long last, that lover you'd nearly forgotten? If not, you do now have a friend, a sister of mercy, to walk you farther into life and into calmer being.

In middle-age, you will get occasional hints, strange intuitions. You try to shrug them off, and if you can't, you push them into your songs. Or you follow them into the words of a poem or other piece written to quell your subtle, eccentric fever. One day, something happens. You catch an improbable glimpse of a face. And it takes you some time to recognize it. When you do, your breath leaves you; your pulse quickens; you feel a warm flush moving from your head into your arms and down into your legs. It is her! How can you be certain? Life is full of illusions, and you've spent most of your life moving in and out of dreams. Then you read her words and fall into a delirium of holy desire. That she is beautiful is only a clue. A body holds, besides the carnal graces, a secret code within the lines. Which can only be read through the newly opened eyes of a pensive child.

But there is a tension, a paradox in Being, on this side of living. Yes, you're persuaded she is real. That it is her. And that she approached this close because it had to be. But the mystic hint of her so long ago – the intuition pointing beyond the frosty mist of an October morning -- has no power in matter. As spirits congeal into atoms, ancient remembrance flows out, and the opium of forgetfulness flows in. She will live according to what human time brings, according to the meanings that appear and give weight to experience. Before the congealing, you must have been near to her when souls were sliced from the Emanation. Knowing that, or at least wanting it to be true, shall have to be enough. You will smile fondly at your old friend, even as you both move on further into the long sigh. Wish her more happiness than you could even desire for yourself.