Desire

Desire is not the body reaching.

It is the soul remembering
what it once touched
before language divided the world
into longing and restraint.

These two figures stand facing one another
in the stillness before surrender.
They are not yet embraced.
They are not yet lost.
They are held in the unbearable tenderness
of almost.

Their hands meet
where the visible world becomes dangerous.
Not in possession.
Not in demand.
But in recognition.

Desire begins there,
in the small charged space
between one hand and another,
where the body knows
before the mind dares to speak.

I have always believed
the body carries truths
we spend our lives trying to translate.
A tilt of the head.
A shoulder turned inward.
The quiet architecture of need.

In Desire,
the figures are both vulnerable and restrained,
bowed toward one another
as if listening to something older than touch.
They do not rush.
They do not perform.
They stand inside the gravity
of what is awakening between them.

This is not lust alone,
though lust is sacred
when it is honest.

This is the moment desire becomes reverence.

The bronze holds the tension:
the ache of wanting,
the discipline of waiting,
the fragile courage
of allowing oneself to be seen.

There is a humility in their posture,
as if each figure understands
that to desire another
is to stand before a mystery
you cannot own.

You can only approach.
You can only offer your hands.
You can only become still enough
to feel what passes through you.

Desire is not weakness.
It is the pulse of creation itself.

Every sculpture begins in desire.
Every poem.
Every kiss.
Every prayer sent into the dark
with no guarantee of answer.

To desire is to admit
that we are unfinished.
That something beyond us
calls the body forward.
That longing is not a flaw,
but a doorway.

These figures do not ask
to be completed by one another.
They ask to be witnessed.

And perhaps that is the deepest intimacy:
not to consume,
not to conquer,
but to stand before another soul
with open hands
and say without speaking,

I feel the world changing
because you are near.

Desire is the space before touch becomes fate.

The breath before love becomes form.

The moment the body bows
to what the soul already knows.

© Gesso Cocteau
Poetry and Sculpture by Gesso Cocteau