You can lead an abstinent horse to water
My desire for her wells and wells without release. I am unequipped to sink as deeply into the ocean of her as my heart alone would, if it were not encased in its clumsy corporal container. I pull her body close to mine, constrict my embrace until she says I must be gentle, but still, she comes not near enough.
The water to which my lustful flesh would have my horse-heart led is an obvious innuendo. A banality, it has become, as I have habitually drunk myself to drunkenness from that fount. Over and over, I have splashed like a child in the shallows and held my breath to swim deep into the depths, but I never reach the bottom and always return to the surface, gasping for air, exclaiming, “There is no end to this wonder!”
But even swimming starts to seem like walking to one who has spent long enough in the water. And then, if the merman were to be fished out and made to walk again, where would his desire to swim satiate itself? Bathing in public water fountains, perusing aquatic aisles at pet stores.
It is agony, yes, but sweet agony. Like hunger before a meal. The first bite is the best. The second, third, and so on are increasingly unconvincing impostors of the true taste in the first. But even before the first, what taste is there already in hunger? Standing in the kitchen, smell is but weak foreplay for the sense of the tongue. Far away from even hope of food, stranded in the desert, memories of taste would remain.
Alas, here I am, in an oasis of her—sleeping in the same bed, seeing her, holding her. All but the deep drink. Like Tantalus, except the fruit lays itself in my palm and the water rises to my lips, and it is only my own obstinate attempts to channel my natural inclinations elsewhere that keep me from biting into the forbidden and drinking the holy.
But not all in vain, as I have felt the force of a dammed river pumping in my veins, and thus have understood the story about the old sage who, when asked about love, led the young student on a journey in the rain. First, to the mountain peak above the clouds. Then, down into the valley, as the rain flooded into the river. And finally, to the coastal cliffs, where the river emptied into the ocean.
In order to test the young student’s comprehension, the old sage asked him, “Where will we go next?” The student looked out at the ocean, then back at the sage, and said, “Back up the mountain, into the clouds.” The old sage smiled, closed his eyes, nodded, and said, “So it is.”