A Weekend In The Wilderness

Revised April 9, 2002-Published in 2002 in Touchstones An Art & Literary Magazine

They look at one another. They look into the light. They jump.

There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what the appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, where would it take you? You see what I fear. One night I dreamed of such a world. I rowed to the surface of the moon and there was no wind, there were no moments, for the moon is as empty as the inside of an eye and not even the sound of a shadow falling falls there. I know you want me to tell you that hunger and silence can lead you to God, so I will say it, but I awoke. As the nail parted from the flesh, I awoke and I was alone.

Ahead of me walks a man who knows the things I want to know about bread, about God, about lovers’ conversations yet mile after tapping mile goes by while I watch his heels rise and fall in front of me and plant my feet in rhythm to his pilgrim’s staff as it strikes the road, white dust puffing up to cover each step, left, right, left.

I wish I had spent this weekend high in the canyon lands, sun beating down on the pallid of my skin, warm winds blowing and tangling the sands of Moab in my hair. The arches standing as a reminder of what my muscles must endure to reach their pinnacle. But I would have welcomed it. I would have welcomed the physical strain, the pain of tired legs and exhausted limbs. Alan did it. He left it all behind—except for Anne, he brought her along, tucked away in his backpack, next to his bottle of sterile water, his bottle of plainwater. What it would have felt like to have read Carson in the haze of the sun setting over the red rocks of the abscond. I would have read Carson to him, to my blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder—to my image of desert. So we climb to the top of the world once more; A thousand miles straight down, straight back to the morning we began.

Saturday April 6 He is annoyed with me today.

I am offering up my sacrifice to God. My mouth is dry and my stomach screaming—but I will not turn my stones into bread, not this time. What more can I give him than my weaknesses as a sign of submission? Christ expelling moneylenders from the Temple and others. Now we are close to the heart of the color. Shame. Water abandons itself. God does not. God takes life over. You don’t look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don’t look. It is like being in the same room with a man you love, and you know you are not strong enough to look at him (yet.) From the back of a truck on a hot June night right before finals, the sky is the deep black of ink wells dotted perfectly with silver stars. I feel my legs pulsating as the burns continue to set in. Second degree I think Leiah says, we need to get something on them. We soak towels in water and lay them across my remaining layers of skin. That day calls my name, begging me to return to the night we slept under God’s dark blanket sky. Heather next to me, softly breathing in the air that just a few hours earlier baked our lungs with every inhalation, but that now fell cold all around us; Leiah and Brooke asleep in the red, rusted truck just a hundred inches away. I lay awake all night under that open sky, under that charcoal heaven wrestling with my God for his forgetfulness, and, for mine. Offenses buried deep, sleeping soundly, not wanting to be disturbed from their dormant place of slumber.

I will gaze at the moon and cleanse my heart—Zeami

People really understand very little of one another. Sometimes when I speak to him, my blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder looks very hard and straight into my face as if in search of something (a city on a map?) like someone who has tumbled off a star. What is it that keeps us from drowning in the moments that rise and cover the heart? It is already late when you wake up inside this question. I should have taken photographs—I only know glimpses of his life. Karin doesn’t have any pictures of Jamie Killian, the boy who drove her to Las Vegas in the dead, dry Utah heat in a long ago May to see Diana Ross. She said he was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen under the moonlight as he pulled the car over and got out, shirt off because it was too hot to keep driving. My blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder is heat. He is the arid, temped intensity of the Arizona sun blazing down on New England. That is who he is, he can sleep anytime.

A conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear. What is the fear inside language? Timing is important in the middle.

I pour my truth into him like I would pour water from one pitcher to another, but water is not something you can hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.

“I don’t want to believe anything” I said (but I was lying)

“And I have nothing to prove” (lying again)

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder stands at my door. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder touches my face. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder looks deep into my eyes. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder says things are different now. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder lays tired in the hall. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder is holding back. I say to blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder I know. I know what you say. I know who you are. I know all that you mean (is it a choice?) Blonde-haired, blue-eyed wonder is rebuilding walls.

I would say that knowing is a road. Coger por el buen camino “to get to the right road.”

A bridge is a meeting point, where those who started out—how many, how many nights ago?—come together. Zeami says that our griefs may hold our greatest hopes.

The rumor is already

in circulation

yet when I began to love

there was not a soul that knew

-Tadamine

I can feel you watching.