Asparagus t e Moon and t e Nature of Love

Ihave taken up the habit of making asparagus on a regular basis. I’ve always liked the tops but the stalky bottoms are hard to make soft enough for my palate. Mom used to call me out when I cut nearly three inches off the bottom of asparagus when we would cook together. Now, I only cut an inch or so; I think it’s out of respect for her. *** Ever since I read Lilith, by George MacDonald, I’ve felt an uncanny camaraderie with the moon. She is the matriarch of the dark, the mother of nightly meetings, the consistent observer of midnight wanderings. She does not loudly intrude on those she watches, like the sun with its blinding, holy noise; the moon is soft. She does not force herself upon the world but acts as a constant, kind, and humble companion. White light, white skin, cool touch. I feel like my own mother is watching me when I look at the moon.

Five months ago, under the fullest of lunar orbs — painting a single, bright white stripe on the Atlantic — I was in a car with a guy I didn’t know all that well. This was before I knew about his tormentors, his doubts, and his loneliness. So, we drove. It was too late at night, I could tell because I was waxing poetic, talking about “how beautiful everything is, you can just feel it! Gosh.”

The mother was watching, to my surprise, in round, white approval.

*** I’ve flown far since that car ride. Snow called me north, so I went; got trapped in the Institute of Art; got trapped in a fantasy of living there, in the cities they call “Twin.” Up and down the snow-covered streets, brightly colored homes grew out of icy drifts and hid behind grey trees. One Friday afternoon spent driving, sliding, down the smooth streets — an attempt at escape from the sub-zero weather — a path opened up, a straight shot to the Mississippi, frozen in her breath and beauty, waiting to be cut by skates. Even in the white of winter noon, I couldn’t run away from the moon. She observed me, this time in the form of the flakes of snow. Tiny moons falling down to say hello. “Hello, I am watching.” Because, like my mother’s love, she transcends my travels and tugs my eyes up to the sky. That was the day he started holding my hand. *** Asparagus grows slow. It takes two or three years for an asparagus plant to mature to the point where it can produce; after that, it stays rooted, hearty. It can produce for 20+ years. For plants, that’s a long time.

Wild asparagus is common in the farmland of the midwest, my hand-holder’s granddad told me. He used to pick it from behind his parsonage. It grew at the back of the graveyard, where a little brook ran down over the dark, moist, cracking shale. The soil, rich and untainted by plows and fertilizers, produced a crop no farmer, but the Farmer could grow.

*** The granddad’s story about asparagus reminded me of another old preacher I’d met. Instead of chatting over a beer at Mulligan’s by the coast, this prophet came to me on the third floor of a library. He convicted me. I was full of fickle heartbreak and the poetry that comes from moody journal entries. But he convicted me of my falseness and made me bleed real, true, vulnerable blood. I’d written seven thousand and one words, trying to describe the pain and heartbreak of the past year alone — he stopped my pen. The man began to talk. He told me about a back injury that had caused him to need a cane. He paused, gazing out across the sunlit tile roof to where the steeple of the chapel towered over Olive Avenue. He commented on the beauty of the chapel, then went on to say something about how it had looked when he was a boy. I put down my book and gave him my attention. He told me about the woman who had first taken him to Church as a child (or “puppy” as he said). Eventually, he told me about his grandparents and their peculiar marriage and divorce. He told me about his spiritual journey, the

25 Creative Essay

26 Creative Essay emotional scars of a long life. I felt like I should be taking notes.

“Men and women, they love differently, you know. You women, you love with your heads. People are your language, you speak it so freely. Men, we get so tangled up in our heads that we can’t make what’s honest come out. We think we’re the man of the hour, that we always have to save the day. Men love like there’s no tomorrow, but you women do it better—you trust that there will always be tomorrow. You keep us waiting, make us patient and kind. My woman always knew what to do. She would hold my hand in church and let her voice call up to heaven. Love a man who would die for you. You’ll know. Just wait and see, girl, wait and see.”

*** Wanting romance over love is thinking that “double space” means hitting the space bar twice at the end of every sentence. It sounds right, but it’s laughably incorrect. It is far safer to be brutally honest than to make someone feel good about themselves. The love you pretend is real lets little pains live under your fingernails, grate on your teeth, sleep with you, rise with you; there is an unending cycle of “to be, or not to be?” until you can’t stand it anymore. I learned all too quickly that this modal approach to love was not something that would be easily understood by others. Like the time I wasted in seventh grade, trying to explain to people that “logical” didn’t just mean something you could say “duh” to. Love is a logic of the spirit. It starts with a proposition and ends with an inevitable conclusion. You don’t get a choice in how it goes really, but you can disguise it from the rest of the world with funny symbols. You must work for love. *** Angels wearing coveralls in libraries are no real basis for a philosophy of love, but they can spark a new understanding of its function. It wasn’t until that day on the third floor that I really understood the kind of communion that is meant for Christian lovers. I didn’t believe in soulmates until I realized that nobody can have or be a soulmate until after love, after they have experienced its fullness, the unifying of soul—experience beyond flesh. It isn’t a matter of finding a soulmate, but of choosing one. When a man gets on one knee, he is asking for a true soulmate: someone to mix his pneuma with, to hold his hand while he hurls inadequate glory back up to his King. Soulmates are for singing life’s song in harmony, with broken voices and contrite hearts. Love is to be—perpetually cultivated by the Farmer—wild asparagus behind a small white church in Minnesota.

*** There are many theories about how the mother-moon was formed. In archaic astronomy, during a more romantic period in science, it was said that the moon might be a hollow spaceship from which extraterrestrial beings spied on us with their advanced technology. A more sensible explanation is that a planet-sized object plowed into earth millions of years ago, and the Earth coughed up rubble that reformed into our little moon. But a newer theory suggests that the moon was formed by synestia. “Syn,” meaning “together,” “Hestia” like the goddess of architecture. Built together—so the moon and the Earth were born simultaneously by a crash and a cloud of molten vaporized rock. Built, together.

Even synestia might not be the answer. When I look at the moon, I savor the enigma. Where did you come from? Where did I? Questions continue, limitless. Love is our mother-moon; we are trying to learn about her, though we know she is just one of those things we will never understand.

The moon’s crescent smirk unsettles my foggy platitude. What do you grin at? Do you gloat at your transcendence? For I am not like you.

I do not wind myself around the earth, astronomic clockwork ticking around solemnly, predicting every change and challenge. I do not wax and wane in solidarity, concealing my right hand, revealing my left, when the calendar mandates.

I am not shackled comfortably to the seasons, knowing when my full blossom will come, go then come again.

But I run amok in the maze of time. Childhood bleeds into my death; heartbreak trespasses onto my joy.

I am young and ancient; my selves multiply. I wax and wane without notice or direction. I am not steadily wound about the earth:

I am flung.

Poetry 27

Poetry 28

Calvinism and coffee go hand in hand, these days. Not like at home in Carolina, where church meant cups of styrofoam and sticky cake doughnuts.

Here, in cauterizing heat and Florida callus we praise God in less clamorous ways.

No more clasped children’s hands reaching up to the cavernous sky. Clapping has more rhythm now but it has lost its charm.

All I have left of childhood religion is the chaff of catechism phrases, ‘chief end of Man,’ and a styrofam coffee cup in my crooked left hand.