Heart Potato

I've been talking with Q a lot lately about love. It's a topic we've always seemed to orbit around, for as long as we've known each other. And why not; love is a subject more worthy of discussion than most. Lately he keeps trying to incorporate Prince into these conversations though, and I wonder if he's trying to tell me something. He did send me a poem by gay old Walt Whitman. And we did say I love you when we last parted. Hmm.

Hmmmm.

Love doesn't know gayness, but it is gay. Love doesn't care who loves, but it is caring. Love is and isn't a lot of things. People often confuse love and happiness, conflating them. Incidentally, love happens to be the cause of much unhappiness; for those who don't have it or have lost it; for those whom it is unrequited. It's hard to hold onto, love; a veritable hot potato. We toss our hearts into the hands of others, passing them from person to person, to place, until they've been dropped and pawed at so long the skin has fallen off and the inside is cold and half mashed. Maybe I should explore a Mr. Potato Head analogy instead? How we all wind up missing an eye or a leg, maybe even a nose, lying at the bottom of an old toy chest, abandoned and alone, left with only a silly hat and a crooked mustache.

But that's not the complete picture, that's just what happens at the end. The road that leads us there is tumultuous and tortured, marked by a small handful of profoundly meaningful connections which, after having dried up and dissolved, leave us with deep creases along the lonesome valley walls of our souls; steep ravines and sharp canyons bare the cracked and blistered memory of love's rushing waters. While the thing is there, there's nothing quite like it. Anyone who has ever felt it can speak to the near-ineffable beauty of being possessed by it; of the communion it brings; the way it makes the world sparkle. When it is there, it is almost all that matters; passion, possibility and purpose all wrapped up into one.

At the beginning, it is a playful stream that gently pulls us along; merrily we go. The stream becomes a river and soon we are caught up in the hurried pull of white rapids; our hearts throb and bang with excitement as we thrash through its whimsical waters. Then, there is a great clearing and a fall; butterflies in our bellies. We crash and sink and then swim, immersed completely in that which carried us. We drift out onto a placid lake and enjoy its soft weightlessness for a while. Here a deep calm takes us, stilling the waters of our souls. We exist here for a time, absolved, sanctified. Rapturous comfort holds us, swaddles us in its grace. Soon we are too much with it. It fills our lungs and we can no longer breathe. Once more we find ourselves lost under the water, staring up at a softly shimmering blanket of liquid light; shadows sinking, sinking, until the scent of our decay perfumes the dim green dark of a swamp's starless sky.

I blame that on Walt Whitman.

"Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

…


The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee."