Want

A Poem After Joan Larkin

Want has always stirred worry within me.

I sit soundly in control.

Not a drinker. An over-thinker. A strategist by trade and temperament.

This part of me who thinks she’s the orchestral maestro of the Universe, you see,

She believes what she wants will materialize.

No questions asked.

Her concern is that she doesn’t want to want the wrong thing.

Sitting with this, with her, I realize she wants the driver’s seat but not the map.

To my absolute shock, she seeks surrender. Hungers for God.

She doesn’t want the pressure of wanting but oh how she longs.

She longs for retirement like a woman who’s given 40 years

to four cubicle walls.

She is wound like a rope that was twisted

until it turned into one hard and heavy knot.

She’s holding. She’s vigilant. She picks up. She carries.

She carries. And she longs to put it all down.

She longs to walk into the forest and fall to her knees

and compost it all and, with it, her body, her life.

The mycelium will do something good with it.

But she can’t. Because she told me she wouldn’t.

And this woman’s word is iron.

She is a martyr and I am her religion.

So I ask her, if she wasn’t hanging up there on that cross,

what would she want?

In truth, she says, I want a cabinet of ceramics made with hand and heart.

A big wooden writing desk.

Giddy screams over steaming nettle tea because she said what we were both thinking.

Holding the gaze of a stag who stands, alert, beneath a mossy redwood.

A glimpse at a new canyon within my beloved’s depths.

A glorious fig harvest.

Most of all, she says, what I want is to tend to life.

And it hits me. The more she will…we will… I will tend and nurture,

the less she will obsess.

Because tending is God’s desire, made manifest.