The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks..." from The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower, Dylan Thomas.

On one butter-yellow wall of my luminous kitchen, in the studio house in east Old Town, Fort Collins, Colorado, where trees burst into the window, is an oil of ripe peaches.  I have thought often that perhaps this painting belongs over my bed:  the fruit is ripe, luscious-looking, at its peak.  My bedroom is semi-lit, inviting me to enter it, my vanilla  lingerie on a hanger on a folding screen, a red lace camisole thumb tacked to the wall, an oil of orchids on the far wall—flowers up close, pistol and stamen revealed, O’Keeffe derivative.  In this room I am acquainting myself with the woman I have become, the Carmen within the romantic. 

Surely our sensuality begins at the earliest moments.  All of life is sensual to a child;  warm milk, the pleasures of wetting the diaper, sucking the thumb,  tumbled and rolled in freshly dried towels after a bath;  touch and more touch.  I remember the Guernsey calves at Thatcher’s Dairy in Albuquerque sucking my fingers until I thought they would pull them off my hand.  I remember the bull turned in with a fresh heifer, astounded by his raging abandon, and more, by the quiescence of the cow, who crooned to herself as she was being mounted, and my father leading me away from something it was thought that I was not ready to see.

In those Albuquerque springs, in the lush and humid bosques along the Rio Grande River, things mated and nested, and fed their young.  I was very curious, and one day when my parents were gone, I took a chair into their closet to reach for the books on the top shelf, which included several marriage manuals, and a first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 

I poured through the latter, finding the plot boring and the intensely sensual passages both fascinating and revolting.  Etched in my mind, the description of Lady Chatterley twining flowers into Mellors’ pubic hair—shocking, fascinating to a child on the threshold of puberty.  This was so lurid to me at the time, I thought it so unladylike. 

The marriage manual troubled me.    Instead, passages that read something like this:  “Husband, when she indicates that she is ready, then it is time to begin the long ascent down the green hill of rapture to the verdant river valley below.”  This passage raised innumerable questions.

When I was twelve, my grandmother gave me a Victorian novel, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.  This was a wonderful story told from the point of view of a knight named Malcolm something, about a beautiful young woman with auburn hair who rebelled against her father in falling in love and leaving home to rendezvous with a valorous knight named John.  It was about the triumph of love and desire over tradition, and I saw in this character my own ambivalence toward sex:  early, early, I understood that passionate, erotic surrender meant to a great extent, giving up the hegemony of the self.

Also when I was twelve, behind a locked bathroom door, I got out of the tub, spread my towel on the floor, and discovered the power and glory of my inner bloom: the clitoris.  My clitoris.  My very own.  I was awed and pleased; my first orgasm was thrilling and I cried out, bringing my mother to the door, knocking and asking me what I was doing. 

I was empowered by this experience and by what my body was capable of.  I would stand in the mirror in the bedroom of our adobe house, and look at my body, pinching my budding nipples.  My friends and I would explore each other in the dark, role-playing our heroes, trading off  being the man and the woman.  Shortly before we moved to Colorado, my best friend crossed an inner boundary.  She knew too much, for twelve: she spread my legs like a tulip, and circled me with her tongue.  This was immensely frightening and pleasurable at the same time, and I sat up, moving away from her.  I was not prepared to give up so much control, and my conditioning already said to me that an illicit kiss was inappropriate..

We know those long years of puberty, spinning our fantasies in the dark, roses in the window, moon rising over the lake or the reservoir, the faint cries of the passion of our parents.  Above all, many of us know about the intense loneliness and need that makes us conjure up lovers, shaping these semblances from what we have read, our crushes on movie stars, our flowering bodies, with their blood tide.  My mother could see sexuality radiating from me, and sent me out on my first dates wearing girdles and stockings with garters, a slip, a dress.  Surely she knew that the tightest corsets had never been

a match for any girl’s desire to taste of the fruit of the tree and explore her power. 

My sessions with myself in the dark of my room, in my subterranean private life, sustained me.  I would play Tchaikovsky and Brahms, and give myself release.  I discovered I could come many times over. I began to write and write lyrical poems, hiding my autoerotic work—poems of love, loss, family events in a crumbling family, love poems to my father, poems about my mother’s mental illness.  The music, the moonlight, the rapture and the hunger, how these things countered pain, drove me.   I did not venture out of this fantasy world into anyone’s arms until I was eighteen.

 copyright 2011 Jenne' R. Andrews 

all rights reserved....