Desire

It doesn’t speak and it isn’t schooled, 
like a small foetal animal with wettened fur. 
It is the blind instinct for life unruled, 
visceral frankincense and animal myrrh. 
It is what babies bring to kings, 
an eyes-shut, ears-shut medicine of the heart 
that smells and touches endings and beginnings 
without the details of time’s experienced part- 
fit-into-part-fit-into-part. Like a paw, 
it is blunt; like a pet who knows you 
and nudges your knee with its snout—but more raw 
and blinder and younger and more divine, too, 
than the tamed wild —it’s the drive for what is real, 
deeper than the brain’s detail: the drive to feel.