How do they do it, the ones who make love without loves? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice staters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other's bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. Who do they come to the come to the come to the God come to the still waters, and not love the one who came there with them, light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin? These are the true religious, the purists, the pros, the ones who will not accept a false Messiah, love the priest instead of the God. They do not mistake the lover for their own pleasure, they are like great runners: they know they are alone with the road surface, the cold, the wind, the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-vascular health- just factors, like the partner in the bed, and not the truth, which is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time.

by Sharon Olds (b.1942)