DESIRE IS AN IAMB by Lauren Fath

water will come again

if you can wait for it.

—Lucille Clifton, “water sign woman”

Mid-March: You wish for the late-winter rain that Seattle is famed for. You wish for all the water the Pacific Northwest can muster, for the pregnant clouds, for a reprise of the last time you saw Jo.  Months earlier, the summer before, you’d reconnected at a writers’ conference in Taos. You’d made the winding ninety-minute drive to rekindle something: the kind guidance she’d offered you during your doctoral program, always tinged with a hint of romance, though at the time you couldn’t have said why. Since Taos, since you walked together through assiduous mist, you’ve stayed in touch, making plans for this Seattle conference, even though you know that an hour or two together is all you really can hope for. You pick a coffee shop near the convention center and the two of you set a morning date.

You know plans with her are made to be broken, how she’ll say, “I’m spent,” in a sincerely apologetic voice. You tell yourself not to ache too hard with anticipation. You tell yourself she’s bound to cancel—always for good reason, but a disappointment nonetheless. You tell yourself to let her mean only as much to you as you mean to her. At the time, you’ll not yet realize just how much that is, won’t deem yourself worthy of the kindness she’s always trying to show you. 

In Taos, over the summer, the two of you had spent the evening circling the small downtown, cloud-shrouded mountains in the background as you talked of loss, as you talked of how grief alters the ways and people we love. During your doctoral program, your husband, the man you’d been with for ten years, had left you. You didn’t know then that Jo, a self-defined “career lesbian,” had begun dating a man in the wake of her father’s death. The two of you were not close in those years—strictly professional, mentor and mentee—and you knew you longed for more but couldn’t yet say why, distraught by your husband’s abrupt exit, though there was far more to it than that, an attraction to Jo you felt but couldn’t name. At the time, you couldn’t have known that your lives were in conversation, that your crush on her was more than just a fleeting ache or literary admiration, that you would meet again a decade later in New Mexico, heady from the altitude and her presence next to you.

In Seattle, you’re staying with your cousin and his wife in their three-story Greek Revival with an elevator and a view of Lake Union. (Your cousin, humble as always, is more eager to point out that you can see the UW football stadium across the water.) You wake up in what feels like pre-dawn light, but really it’s just the city obscured by fog and rain glazing the stained glass window of your guest room. You’re somehow comforted by the thrum of traffic on nearby I-5, crossing Ship Canal Bridge, and the car lights, white one direction and red the other, that pierce the haze. As you walk to the nearby bus stop, you note the difference in the air—the petrichor of fertile ferns and pines. It’s the atmosphere you’d hoped for, perfect for recreating that Taos night, even if you know that repetition is impossible.  

The coffee shop is anything but the cozy setting you’d expect from a place with an antique name like “Victrola.” It’s half-empty and stark, with mid-century modern replica chairs and broad glass windows permeated by the cold. Jazz standards on the speakers offer only a hint of warmth. You pick a table, sit down, and check your texts, even though Jo’s not even late. She arrives, bundled in a black wool coat, her long brown hair loose over her shoulders. She sweeps it off her forehead, out of her eyes. She is tall and lithe, with a purposeful gait. You stand up and embrace her, apologize for your selection of a place. 

“It lacks atmosphere,” you say. 

“But it’s quiet and not too crowded,” she replies, and she’s right. 

You linger too long, talking, over green tea and a cappuccino. She has also ordered a maple-glazed doughnut. You’ve always considered her a gourmand, and it pleases you to see her break character—reveal her true appetite—with the fluffy, fried pastry. You ask to see pictures of her daughter, and she pulls out her phone, flipping through images of a girl who looks feisty but wise beyond her years, with wide green eyes and hair the color of a shiny penny. Even as Jo asks you earnestly about your writing, your career, you worry that your life must seem so boring—an academic living alone in a small town, a middle-aged single lesbian. You wonder, does she pine for the days when she was all of these? You don’t ask. You know she has been where you are, and then let fate and desire—love—take her another way.

As she puts away her phone, she says, “Oh, I nearly forgot,” and pulls a paperback from her large handbag. It’s a short story collection by Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields. She hands it to you and says she thinks you’d like it—the Chekhovian influence, in particular. You thank her, but are too shy to say that you’ll cherish it because it is a gift from her. Another thing you won’t say, though you want to: “I’m sure that many people have told you you’re beautiful, but now I get to count myself among them.” It’s the truth, though. She has a high forehead and square jawline, prominent cheekbones and eyes that change from brown to hazel, depending on the light. She looks at you like you’re the only person in the room.

Unlike you, she does not withhold compliments. She is deliberate with them, sincere. At one point, as you’re talking about applying to fellowships, she likens you to her best friend—a writer you know, too, someone who’s witty, practical, and compassionate. You’re flattered by the comparison, by the way she sees value in you that you struggle to find, and maybe that’s what’s so attractive about her. As you seek out the unrequited because you feel it’s what you deserve, she tries to convince you otherwise. As Jo writes, “If we are not careful, we may well destroy ourselves and all we love in the pursuit of suspect improvement, specious development, not realizing until it is too late that the world and we are, after all, enough as we are.” Were she still your professor, Jo would tell you that you’ve taken these words out of context; they’re about rainforests, not love. But in her presence, you can interpret any desire to embody your own.

Realizing the time, the two of you leave for the conference, hustling because you’re late and because the rain’s starting to fall harder. At the convention center, she holds the door for you—a gesture you find charming in its chivalry, can’t help but read as a remnant of the lesbian life she’s left behind. On the escalator, she asks about love interests. You feel your face flush. You can make no hint of your attraction to her, though it must be evident in the way you stand close to her, the way your voice softens in her presence, the way you speak slowly, searching for the right words. But you also want to tell her the truth, to open up to her as much as she has to you. There is someone else, another unrequited love. You tell her about K, an attorney in Santa Fe, with whom you go to concerts and dim, quiet restaurants, who sends you text messages with songs she likes, who invites you to spend the night at her house, but never with the intention of romance. If the two of you stay up late, it’s to read aloud to each other the poems of Amy Lowell or Mark Strand or Robert Hass.

“I like her already,” Jo says. “Why don’t you ask her out?”

“But we already go out,” you say, then, “and I don’t want to jeopardize the friendship.” 

It’s true. You’ve leaned toward something more with K before, holding each other in a hug too long at the end of the night. “I feel like we’re on the line,” she’d said to you afterward, but you knew about her on-again, off-again lover in another state, that any attempt at a relationship was futile. The irony isn’t lost as you tell all this to Jo. Whether it’s with K or with Jo, you like to stay suspended in the unattainable.

On the third floor, you look for the meeting room in a maze of hallways. “This way,” you say, steering Jo by her elbow. 

“I bet you’re good to travel with,” she says, commenting on your sense of direction, though really you’ve just followed an arrow painted on a pillar. “We should travel together.”

It’s an arbitrary suggestion, you know, a compliment rather than a commitment. But you allow yourself to read it as the latter, as another unattainable thing to hope for. You’re already traveling together, you reassure yourself, since you meet in spaces in between, places home to neither you nor her, where you’re both slightly out of sorts and disoriented, touring the unfamiliar. When you’re with her, you get to dwell in the imaginary, to pretend there’s any chance her musings might ever come true. 

A few minutes into a panel on book promotion, a staff member comes in and says the room is over capacity, fire marshal’s orders. She asks for volunteers to leave. You and Jo abandon your chairs and move to the hallway, where you can see through a glass partition and hear through the open door. You sit down on the carpeted floor, legs crossed, knees nearly touching. There is an intimacy to this—lounging next to her, watching her take notes in cursive scrawl. The air seems warmer, or maybe it’s just that you’re still wearing your coat. You feel a certain privilege to be with her, and not just because strangers come up to offer compliments on her novel or her presentation the day before. Yet, again, you feel like the only person she sees. She lets you guide her around the convention center, a willing accessory to your infatuation.

You lead her to the next session—one on writing about motherhood—and she asks you to stay. You do, though you have no motherhood to write about except your own mother. As you sit in the warm, dim auditorium, you’re too aware of your own body, which is next to her body. Like you, she crosses and uncrosses her legs, shifts in her seat. You’re not sure what to do with your hands, so you hold a pen poised over a notebook, though record shows you don’t write down a word, so strong is the urge to drape your arm over the back of her chair, across her shoulders. 

Too soon, you have to go back to your cousin’s house and pack, then head to the airport for your nighttime flight. You and Jo linger in the lobby. In July, she’ll be in Taos, she says. She invites you to her house, says she’d love to have you over for lunch. She calls the house “little,” and you wonder what that means to her. It doesn’t matter; it is the fulfillment of something you thought you could only ever imagine: taper candles and mahogany furnishings, Mahler on the stereo. Another musing that might come true.

Desire is an iamb, you think as your feet press out the word on rain-soaked sidewalks during your walk from the bus stop back to your cousin’s. (“Heartbreak is a spondee,” you remember from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book you and Jo discussed this morning.) Desire, desire, desire. If you walk slowly enough, it becomes three syllables, an amphibrach—unstressed, stressed, unstressed: des-I-her. In protracted time, the two of you become separate syllables.

On the plane, you open up Walk the Blue Fields, hoping to find out why Jo gave it to you, what trace of you she saw in its pages. It is dark, foreboding, and indeed Chekhovian. The characters in these stories are content to live with hope and nothing else. It’s a hope that remains unfulfilled, ruined by thwarted love, family betrayal. They lie to themselves and one another, either because they fail to see the truth or because they refuse to acknowledge it. 

You don’t cry during the flight, even though you want to. But what is there to cry over? You long only for what you never had, and you remind yourself that you’ve found what you never thought you would: a certain intimacy with Jo that you would have marveled at a decade ago. “In those days,” Jo writes, “I mistrusted passion; I had not yet experienced the illuminating love that is beyond all judgment or calculation, love like a benediction that makes clear that we do not need to earn our place, calculate our value, that we have inestimable value all our own before we do a thing, as does a forest or a star.” You recognize that Jo has been trying, all along, to convince you of your own value. You gaze out the window, wiping away breath-steam with your fingertips to see the terrain below, scattered with small, shimmering lights. 

You picture the drive to Taos, north from your small town and up, up, up into the mountains. In Carson National Forest, trees canopy the winding, narrow road, reaching toward the middle where their branches meet. Claire Keegan seems to understand this image, or maybe she lends it to you: “On either side,” she writes, “the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean.” You think Jo would like this, call it “lovely,” a word she uses generously. 

In July, you will meet up for lunch, though not at her little house (if she forgot her promise, you do not remind her). She chooses a restaurant, where you are served salads in cardboard takeout containers. It’s hardly what you’d imagined, though you reassure her that the place is cozy and the food quite good. Nonetheless, she apologizes, promises you a “real lunch” next time. You eat on the patio and scoot your chairs to stay out of the high noon sun, anchor your paper napkins, which want to flee in the wind. 

You will always equate Jo and Taos with water, but today there’s not a drop. The sky is bluebird-bright and cloudless. You ache at the possibility that it could be ten more years before you walk with her in the rain, so infrequent are your meetings. But the feeling will stay on your skin, unforgotten. As you leave the restaurant to go your separate ways—she to her house up the road, you to yours down the mountain—Jo holds the door for you. 

Lauren Fath is the author of My Hands, Remembering: A Memoir, finalist for the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, and the lyric essay chapbook A Landlocked State. Her recent work has appeared in CutBank, NELLE, and Tahoma Literary Review. She is an associate professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.

21 August 2025