A Lesson on Sunday School Truth, with Parables

It’s a curse, where before there was no curse, that I’ve fallen in love. Like this.

I am not being impetuous. I am cautious like a tree is cautious. I am deliberate like honey. I cast glances like the sun casts shadows. I keep the requisite distance from the object of my desire, but I burn in the places where love burns, at the nape of the neck, in the gut, throughout the legs, but also in the head, where I know that the world will cast its aspersions for this love. It will try to skim stones off the surface of my skin, across my face, three, four, six times a stone. I am in pain from the thought of these stones, which come from without while this love comes from within. With me the external has always been more powerful than the internal, which I cannot touch, which I can only ever embody.

There’s one boy in the nursery I decide I love. I stare at him and try to think of what I should call him. I decide I will call him Benny.

Benny is a three-course meal. Benny is the flank of a roaming antelope. Benny is the absent portion of the crescent moon, the brazen curve of the crescent moon, the blue, charmed hue of the moon. Benny is the calm breathing of deep sleep, of a child long in sleep, of a colicky steam whistle. Benny runs with the sheep dogs. Benny runs with bells on his ankles. Benny runs with the electrons, is as small as the electrons, is so far away as to be as small or smaller than the electrons. I set my mind to working on ways to attract him.

I approach him, though he runs with the children, circles along a circular alphabet, around the earth, about the edges of the globe that’s tiled to the floor of the nursery. To keep up, I run. We are a laughing cavalcade, a covey of laughing quail. We are prone to fatigue, we are prone to collapse, we are a laughing heap in the middle of the globe.

There are the good teachers and the bad teachers and the teachers who have no sense of beauty and no sense of humor. I am a laughing teacher. I see beauty where others see utility or a pin board for a litany of human rights.

"Hi, Benny," I say. We have untangled our arms and legs, we have stood up, we have stopped laughing. The bell has rung. The parents have come, the parents are coming. Another girl pipes up. This girl has hair of burning thrush.

“Her name’s Becky, not Benny,” she informs me.

What does she think I am? Who does she take me for, this little four-year-old sunburst, this cog of weeds and fennel? “Who is teaching whom?” I want to ask. Who are the students, and who the teacher? Who presents reality in the classroom, in the nursery, to those whose minds are flawless imagination? Who sits on mats on the tiled globe like little rotten countries and who rises before and above like the light of day? Who is the Rosetta stone to the mute and confused, the priestly man in the priestly robes, with the valiant throbbing conscience, the bald head like the burning lamb of Moses?

Does she think I don’t know what it means to be Benny and what it means to be Becky and what the difference between the two is? Does she think that I have not lain, like the breath of some featureless god, between the legs of that snowcapped mountain only to suffocate on the foliage, only to wet myself from fear of the dark and of the noises of the dark cave? Where are the pomegranates, the promised wedge fruit? Or the branches of the tree, the manacled leaf, the chloroform, the dripping dew?

Whatever it is she thinks is true about the world, she cannot yet know that truth is a function of love and subject to its whims and monikers. I am here, floating above the world, to show these seeds how love transforms and saves us from the vulgarity of the truth of others, forced upon us; from the disgusting truth of another’s passion; from the crime of codifying one man’s love into a universal anything. To this other girl, Benny is just a girl--the four-year-old girl Becky--a purely contingent entity in her blunt domestic universe, a porcelain doll on her dresser. But to me Benny is a boyish palimpsest, the glowing coral swirl within and under sea foam and water, an uncompromised banana fruit.

Whatever it is she thinks she knows, what this other girl doesn’t know is that I got to within one consonant of the boy’s name just by looking at him, and that with the ease and patience of dawn, I’ll leave hardly a footprint when at last I sink into the soil.