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"Greed and Aggression"
Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression and I think of the way I lay the massive weight of my body down on you like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the elegant heavy body of the eland it eats, the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven. Ecstasy has been given to the tiger, forced into its nature the way the forcemeat is cranked down the throat of a held goose, it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of eating packed at the center of each tiger cell, for the life of the tiger and the making of new tigers, so there will always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like stripes of night and stripes of fire-light— so if they had a God it would be striped, burnt-gold and black, the way if I had a God it would renew itself the way you live and live while I take you as if consuming you while you take me as if consuming me, it would be a God of love as complete satiety, greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the way we once drank at the body of an animal until we were so happy we could only faint, our mouths running, into sleep.
—Sharon Olds
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