Imaginary Lines

White sky: blue-tinged and shadowy to the north, brighter by infinitesimal gradations as we crane our heads and trace a line through the zenith and down to the low southern shelf where the sun is stowed -- somewhere behind the sheets -- in deep winter. But all white, and all pulsing with diffused light.

I think of the rope of flesh, the rope that ties everything and nothing: how frail it is, how uncertain: how driving the need and how crushing the disappointment. How do we bear it, just the ordinary life, let alone the disasters and the calamities? Making love, you have to imagine that the line continues, like our imaginary line in the sky: from the root of the tongue through the central channel of the body, to where the cervix of the womb kisses the tip of the penis, on down through the kinked turn at the prostate, and up channel to the other tongue-root, also speechless. You draw lines, hoping that none will fail. You celebrate the solstice because you're not sure, not quite really sure, that the sun ever will climb again.

So far, so good. I may well walk on grass of Mt Tabor, on the concrete sidewalks of Portland, for my 56th summer, with the sun pouring down, and heat pouring back up from the glowing ground. The shadowed north will seem pleasantly cool. But there's a shelf there too, for when the playthings are all put back in the box.