In the still of the night

In the still of the night

God lays before me

a body empty of bed

But there is wanting

of body, of bed

of all bondings 

the Spirit moves

God calls me;

I hide

while all wanting clings

perfume from a flowering stem

for God is more than good

more embrasure than the heart can bear

more than a body bears

in the still of the night

*There are those like Osama bin Laden - who was raised as an upper class Saudi in Geneva - who will seek the sweetness of a pure line.  One sensed the same desire in the Columbine massacre in Colorado, where the grandson of an observant Jew chose Hitler's birthday to charge into the cafeteria. These are children who want one  pure thing in a world in which they suddenly realize there are only mixed things.

-Richard Rodriguez

*I probably overuse the term (Puritanism), but in Brown I use it most successfully in considering the closing of the playhouses in England in the seventeenth century, where it reflects a fear of the imagination.  I began to detect a Puritanism in the racial politics of the 1960's I was raised in.  I describe in Brown how an American Indian was not allowed to impersonate himself precisely because the Puritans at the university I attended, Stanford, insisted that they knew what reality was and that reality only had one face.  The Puritan impulse for me is an attempt to find clarity or even the handspring of God within history in a way that does not admit to the unpredictable or even the playful.  It is strongest precisely in those areas in our culture where we think we are free of color, free of Puritanism.  I have described the sexual excess of the gay community in San Francisco in the 1970's as very Puritan, and in many ways there was this kind of sexlessness to all sexual license.  It was not joyful.  It was manic.  It was an attempt to identify as gay in a way that our Puritan ancestors would have acknowledged - being one thing to the exclusion of being other things.  The idea that as a homosexual man, I can write in ways that are not at all homosexual, that I have other doors in the hallway of my imagination, remains very puzzling to a number of gay Puritan friends of mine.  They would call it a kind of oppression, because I do not see everything through one lens.

-Richard Rodriguez