More on: desire

Let me be clear: I desire you / as a body desires a body. As a fern / / bends toward the window, night & day.

The one thing I’m certain you created / is desire, different forms of it, / cut from the same bone far and / / high in the night.

      The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) This, the ocean’s rustled babble— was it the first sound the first woman heard as she was cut out of another body’s desire, wet and sand-soaked as a shell pried out from the shore? How could it not have been thus— like now with you, expected one, shuttered in,…

Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it!” Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.”                      …

IN A SCENE from book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve talk one evening of the glories of Eden and their unmerited free creation by God, unaware that they are being watched by Satan. This little scene takes place shortly after Satan’s shape-shifting arrival in Eden and serves as a kind of foreshadowing…

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it… ————————————-—Simone Weil Simone Weil, it’s hard to concentrate on you with those three boys on the next bench blowing up balloons and letting them go, all squirt and grunt, fizzling into— the void, I think you’d say. And…

Has birth ever peeled you apart Has birth ever hollowed you out For I have seen a woman being transfigured Into lips her water breaking like the first Ocean spilling between the thighs of creation And then between those lips her firstborn crowning Like a tongue that dips to test the light and scalds Have…

1. February 2, 2008: Learning the Rosary Birth is the first affliction but there is no birth. Birth is the beginning of endless affliction ending finally in dying but there is no death. This has never been explained to me in words, but mutilations. I watch you watching something from the window and smiling in…

Like a baker, swaddling the juice and heft of apples in pastry, I want my mouth to cradle the delicious name of God. Kissing the Torah, I breathe the dust that has lain on the name of God, imagine ink on my indrawn breath. I will dream myself into the body of a bee. I…

WHEN MY FATHER’S PEOPLE came down from the Appalachians to work in the mills and mines of north Alabama, they brought with them a desire for strong drink, loose women, and visitations by the Holy Ghost. A census taker who interviewed some of these Covingtons noted that they were illiterate, and then also checked the…