Of Wanting

The first two lines of this piece are excerpted from Geffrey Davis's poem, "What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse". 

We have our places for
loneliness-- that loaded asking of the body.

And what a strange, heavy bauble to be given
at birth and told not what to do with. Some hang

it round the neck of another: you,
you the center to which this, my itching

gravity shall pull. It has been pulled
into weaving, oral tradition, the stories of

what this or that one did with her yearning, what heights
what great distances he travelled

at devotion's behest. Vast & dust-blessed
libraries of tomes, written & unwritten, all

scrawled in someone's pain, the patient
self-prescribing, hand claw-fisting around threads found

from the air; discovery in sheer desperation.
Each stalk of wheat in a serotinal field somewhere 

a tried & true method, sanctified by shaman, 
magician, neuroses' emanation, pope. 

Damned voices of saints. Keys told 
to transmogrify our shared, yet secret pulse 

of wanting.