Moments are like professional magicians with cards up their sleeves. They’re always rearranging things and are never quite content with reality the way you comprehend it. This is why, when you are lost in the moment, as soon as you find your way you shake your head like a magician’s assistant stepping out of the vanishing box and say, “Where am I?” Moments always rearrange love.

Love is a shape shifter. This is not one of the five things. Consider it a bonus.

The five things begin with a 2000-year-old story and end with a story in the moment. Here is the 2000-year-old story:

One day, when Jesus was trying to make a point, one of his disciples (I believe it was Judas) said, “We could have sold that Valuable Commodity and given the money to the poor.” The disciple (let’s say, for the sake of argument, it was Judas) didn’t care a whit about poor people; he was skimming off the top of petty change and wished he could add a percentage of the cost of the Valuable Commodity to his purse. Jesus was wise to him and said, “The poor will always be around. I won’t.”

A few days later, Jesus said, “Wherever you find society’s marginalized, wherever you find street bums and guttersnipes, skid row drunks and hookers on the stroll, wherever you find suicides and crack junkies and people so poor they cease to exist in the eyes of their peers, wherever you find folks you don’t want to know, that’s where you’ll find me.” His disciples were a little freaked out by that statement because they had heard him tell Judas, “The poor will always be around. I won’t.” It seemed like a contradiction to them.

Years later, 2000 in fact, she sits at her desk with a bamboo calligraphy brush and a tray of Japanese ink, and she very carefully inscribes a phrase she will not share with me on the inside of her thigh. The act angers me, because I know what she is writing. Regardless of what she says is written there, I know the truth. It is the secret Name of God. She won’t reveal it to me because she knows I cannot be trusted with it. And she is right: I would abuse the secret Name of God as I have bruised her mouth with my own; I would inflame the world with it, even as my eyes are now embers of coal staring at the place where her hand rests lightly, covering the thing she has written.

“One does not share the phrase of the moment in the moment,” she tells me.

Now this is where the story gets tricky and becomes a case of misdirection, like a magician breaking a seal on a fresh deck of cards, only to pull a rabbit out of the box: Phrase or no phrase, I want her. And — please don’t flinch away from this — I want her in every shadowy violent sense of the word. After all, what else is desire if not dark and carnivorous? I swear I want to split her lip with my insistent kisses, and drink her essence as one drains a glass of port. The throb of her pulse points is indispensable to the sustenance of life as I know it — as vital as the Name she has brushed into her skin. Unless you comprehend this first thing, you will not get any of what follows: Desire clouds everything as smoke clouds glass. But none of that matters when one can press his ear to the secret Name of God and hear the symphony of a billion oceans in the pulse of a woman’s blood.

Dark, I tell you. And getting darker as we press forward. The second thing is like the first: Whitman was right. “Without one thing all will be useless….” The thing, of course, the surprise we want to hide from the audience behind props, the intimacy we coyly hint at and slyly giggle about, the event we allude to with cinematic kisses and billowing curtains, the act we profane with pornographic efficiency, the mirror we cannot and will not look into directly is sex. Not sex in any of the aforementioned impieties, but raw, aching, needy, fundamental, elemental sex. The commingling of physical forms. Terrifying oneness, loss of individuality. A sudden, unexpected, common breath.

She presses the palms of her hands into the mahogany nightstand and pushes toward me. In that moment the molecules of her hands join those of the dark wood; her blood carries its darkness through her body into mine and I taste sawdust in my mouth. The darkness collects into Japanese kana characters along her spine, and I caress them as a blind man reads the Braille translation of a favorite novel. “Yes,” she says. “There. Oh, yes. There.” Down her spine the characters creep and transform, expressing in darkness the words spilling from her lips. I bend to trace their shapes with my tongue.

In ecstasy, I whisper perfect Russian poetry into her ear, though I cannot speak a single word of the language.

This is the third thing: Because I know that, without the secret Name of God, I am powerless to hold her, I take a sliver of glass from my pocket, open a vein, and write her name in my blood on the hardwood floor. Then I take a platinum thread, tie one end to her name and the other to her wrist.

She looses the knot and laughs. “Do you think my name defines me?” she asks. She is right: Nothing defines her.

The fourth thing is the single word she leaves each morning on her lips. The word is a medium of exchange. Yesterday it was panacea; today it is obsession. I take the word from her lips, place it under my tongue and pass the remainder of the day enriching others from the bounty she has given me. Then, home from my transactions, I slip our collected revenues from my mouth to hers with a kiss, enriching her vocabulary, expanding her horizons.

Some days her thoughts are half-formed, her dreams are not fully realized. On those mornings I close my eyes, steal into her dreams, and find her lips, her teeth, the roof of her mouth. Often, the choked and unfinished word is lodged in her palate and I pry it loose with my tongue. She awakens and asks, “Do you see what I mean?”

Now we come to the fifth thing. Ah! The fifth thing.

She forms this sentence with a blissful sigh: “I won’t restrict you.” Slowly (oh!), so slowly my heart races with suspense, she moves her hand away from the word she has written. I echo her bliss.

At first I think the phrase is “Jesus saves.” But this is not the case. Instead, there is a single word, a word that slows my rapid heartbeat to a steady, passionate throb:

“LUMPENPROLETARIAT”

I smile, knowing it is the same thing. She kisses my mouth. “Clever boy,” she says.

I kneel and touch my lips to the inside of her thigh.