Beyond Sex to Our Shared Need

My feet sink in crusty snow leading the horses deep into the pasture. Wind blows through seams in my coat and the cold goes with me, mocking every fire. A mighty bellows breathes me into the universe yet I curse the day I was born.

One does have to question the woman who equates her gift with Vesuvian pleasures, yet also has to allow her the answer which she does not withhold. Hills float across a frozen landscape, bemoaning the starving deer who falter under snowy pines. Vermont breathes me and briefly my prayer becomes a plea: oh when will the Lord consent to my going home?

Chickadees preen in sunlight as if arguing on behalf of giving the side yard lilac another season to try its feeble blooms. When I err, I apologize and yet somehow go on in error. What church spat me out, what confused wolf raised me?

The horses exhale noisily attending to the hay I toss on crusty snow just beginning to acquire the sacred blue light of dawn. A woman smiled at just the right time in my life and instantly a theology of prisms appeared fully-formed in my mind. Go all the way to the river and on its banks profess your love for the Lord, without worrying what judge is taking notes.

Ice floes the size of Fran's Chianina team now drift through the oxbow, harbingers of a spring that I still don't quite believe I'll see. The prayer is ongoing, as long as desire is ongoing and in this way our wordiness becomes a veil obscuring the generative object. She cries out when I come in her and for a moment I see beyond sex all the way to our shared need to release these bodies altogether.

Face the vast emptiness threatening your identity? In the back room I pour tea from a dented thermos and nurse an unfamiliar text into something resembling the psalms. "Ask not what Jesus can do for you but what you can do for Jesus" is quietly aggressive but not in principle unhelpful.

You'll have to continue to forgive me my dear, at least until I can find that little cabin up north. Ten thousand bowls of soup, not one of which takes the edge off this hunger for you naked in both body and thought.