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Mister Miner first wrote “Desire” on a napkin in a restaurant. When he received the bill from the waitress (by whom he had become more and more enraptured as the evening progressed) he enclosed the first ever copy in the booklet in which the bill had arrived (with payment too of course). To Mister Miner’s knowledge, the waitress never made any attempt to contact him. In any event, I certainly hope she kept the napkin.
Desire is the theme, but more importantly, the poem's fixation is the things separating a desire which is simply longed for and a desire which is pursued and fulfilled. In order for the desire expressed to be fulfilled, two very difficult tasks must first be performed: the speaker would have to be transformed back into a child, either by miracle or by some sort of scientific marvel I could never hope to propose. To complicate matters further, the person whom he desires would have to have already been transformed into a “jar of cookies in the cabinet” by the time his own transformation into a child had taken place. This timeline is so crucial to the poem because establishing a parallelism between a man’s desire for a pretty girl and a boy’s desire for a jar of cookies is such a delicate process. Were a young child to witness an event as traumatizing as a girl mutating into a jar of cookies, I believe his reaction to this particular jar of cookies would be dramatically different than to one that just happened to be there already.
The principle message of the poem is plain enough: a person encounters another possessing just the right magical spell or chemical equation to reignite a childish and perhaps primal archetype of “desire”. What the obstacles of desire reperesent in the metaphor of the child and the cookies is readily apparent, but if it were interpreted that the child represents a grown man and the cookies represent a girl he desires, what do the “kitchen stool and countertop” represent?
Fortunately, we have two clues to work with: we know that both of these items enable the child to bridge the gap between having and not having what he desires. We know also that the things that “realize desire” are the things enabling the boy and the cookies to come together. Extrapolating the poem to be a representation of grown people, the both desire and the obstacles standing in the way become much more complicated. If all or even most of our desires being realized were a universal norm, the poem would succeed more likely with a title such as "Fullfillment" and with content to match.
The message of the poem, therefore, is that as children, our desires and the means of realizing them are both simple. We know that Mister Miner's desire for the waitress was never realized; may we then think "Desire" is his lament over how adult desires are difficult to attain? I would answer this question as follows: does every waitress examine every billfold--every client? Is every waitress unhappily single--unhappily engaged? Now finally, think again, can the core feeling behind any adult longing really be more complicated than a child's desire for cookies?