Desire is no light thing.

Anne Carson's Geryon wings himself right into that truth. I've seen desire called a wonderful catastrophe. I'd name it, instead, a catastrophic wonder. Perhaps also a stupendous unfairness.

I don't know whether you'll hear me writing this, from my eyrie above a fog that should not be gathering in January. For all I know, you've been listening all along.

Some absences are easier to navigate than others; I am becoming a regular mariner of near missing, and what you imagine I'm writing about is only the thing I think I could explain, not the thing that might well come to matter more.

While I wander, I will collect these windings and weavings in log books bound in calf. I will gild their covers' script. I will sign my leaves in unimagined colors, gather them in the most complicated duodecimos. I will use only the finest nibs, and an ink the precise color of this moment of dusk.

I will etch the details again and again until someone figures out what I'm feathering, how great the humility of its wanting, how sweeping and soaring its coming spring.

source for tonight's image: e-flux, though Anselm Kiefer's "Buch mit Flügeln" lives in the Modern Art Museum in Houston and is currently sojourning in San Francisco.