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Show DESIRE How the melody of a single ice cream truck can rise from the streets of your city and bring with it every year you have ever known. How it can bring forth children and the promise that has always belonged to them and the shining dimes and the rush of icy vapors from the truck's freezer to the sky. How it rises past the green froth of maple leaves to your window as if to say, Summer already. here for you and haven't they always been? And haven't you given each one of them away, your arms lifted, your mouth opened for the cool winds of October? Yes, you think, on the other side of the country in the long tanned valleys of California, the fiddle-neck curls upon itself and crows pull every living morsel from the soft ground. And further west, on the warming coastal rocks of the Pacific, crabs raise their one good arm to the sun - like the farmer in China you imagine or the dusty pistils of tulips in Europe, But you have to be here, listening to an incessant song and children who want, who want, no more and no less than yourself. Tell your sorrow to the gulls that flail outside your window, too far inland for their own good. They could be at any shore but they are here and isn't that all they're good for: to be screamed at, to scream back? Tell it to the man who shares your bed and he will weight his head more deeply into his pillow, touching your hand out of habit, taking you ever farther from the life you wanted as if you ever wanted a life, as if your many mounting desires led to no more than the final consolation of silence and the long dreamless sleep of those who hunger for nothing. Ah, that is the lie we tell ourselves - that we can do without this life. For if night darkened our eyes and our very hearts turned cold as the moon, then wouldn't you take it all back if you could? Three thin dimes in your pocket and the music of a truck close to your ear and the summer already moist in your armpits -- don't you want to wrap your lips around the melting sweetness of it? Won't you pay and keep paying for as long as you must, to know it belongs, has always belonged, to you? |