my computer is old, cranky, temperamental, slow. i try to open old images and the computer's motor whorls, works, goes uphill and down, to the breakdown of time and space, out into numbers and dashes and pulls back images from the ether. i wait. one photo. and then another opens. there you are, my son younger, my lover not yet my husband. you are on the shore of a great lake and in the first photograph together in what i know is the tunneled cold. you heft a log. oh my, what will happen? in the next, incrementally, as the luxury of technological photography allows, you move your arms in tandem a fraction backward, swing the pendulum of girth and weight effortlessly now, although i see the evidence in the history of your shoulders and knees. open, open! i want the next image to open! i want to see what you will do, what you have done, what i already know and even then knew. you will set the log sailing through the air and then splashing into the cold water. but it comes over me, the desire to see again, to witness the unfolding of the simple event, not in my mind but through my body! and i am filled as though with the longing to eat a fresh vegetable, one i can not identify nor name but a vegetable stubborn, resolute like the cantankerous radish, the jerusalem artichoke, the turnip, something difficult and notable, but how i want to - how i want to - like a revelation of flesh, the translation of the earth's soil - eat it! as i wait, i salivate. as i wait, it is all that i am, this hunger for the vegetable, food of the earth, natural progression through earth's time, born into skin! but not all that i am for if i separate the thing from its shadow i am starving for the hunger too and desirous to hold it all a moment in my mouth, to have taste break inside my being into being and to know it absolute, beforebeforebefore before the unforgivable swallowing.
