“It was a moment of miracles. She there before him: no longer some remembered teenage girl so much older than him but a full-blown woman still young and lovely, arched upright down there before him. In her best clothes better than any he owned by appearance but still he could look at her and see she was a countrywoman, a country colored woman who’d done well for herself and had dressed as such to make her journey back. And he could sit there, feeling ruined and proud and stronger than he had in years, maybe all his life, and look down at her and know that the both of them, each helpless before it, were right back in that rain-pouring-down kitchen all those years before. And he did not know any reason not to trail her over with his eyes, sitting silent that long time with her quest still out unanswered in the air between them, but sweep her with his eyes and let her watch him doing that. Because that was what lay between them. Then, and before, and always. And each knew it.

“Now it seems to me that you have begun to learn about sorrow. And that’s good. Good for you. But what you still don’t understand is desire. As a poet, Foster Pelham, you have to understand desire. We have, I believe, covered a portion of it. When we talked about the nature of man, of evil. That was yesterday. Or was it the day before? It don’t matter. Because man is at least an octagon. And desire is the one point that will lead. Where you have no choice. So, the poet is after desire.”

(“No,” he said. “I’m not a poet.”)

“A truth-seeker. And you should not disclaim that. I don’t need long stories to explain desire. Desire is not what the preachers talk about. What they talk about is what they fear most simply in themselves: chasing after whatever they can get. That is not desire. That’s not passion. That’s simply old root-hog-or-die. It’s why I can’t abide religion. They will not get down in the dirt and talk about how things really are. The best they can do is prate about the little common things that afflict each and every one of us. But they shy from the big ones. Because the big ones are so vast, reaching out to all of life, that there is no way to make a neat parable of them. There is no simple right or wrong. Desire then, desire is when you are helpless. It’s not a lapse, you see. It’s the truth of yourself. It’s all you have. All you can ever hope for. Right here on the sweet old earth. It is everything. It is, when you have it, something you know the Lord would bow His head before. Because, if He knows nothing more, the Lord understands desire. And when you have that, when it owns you, directs you, you have no choice but to surrender to it.