"Paradiso XIV, 63" by Matthew Buckley Smith

Mea culpa: I forgot to mention that the last line of the poem can also be read in the following sense: desire to LIVE and not merely to EXIST ("be" alone). In this reading, it is the body which allows the soul to actually "live." 

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Matthew's podcast, "Sleerickets" 
-The Dantesque pairing of this and the following episode 
-A defense of the "embrace materiality" agenda 
-"Being Human" by C.S. Lewis 
-Literary power couple Matthew and Joanna 
-Alice Allan's podcast "Poetry Says" 
-Dante's Commedia 
-The heavenly soul's desire for their body at the rapture 
-Italian (Petrarchan) sonnets 
-We're enjambin' 
-If you took a shot every time I mentioned Milton, you'd be mildly buzzed sometimes. 
-Le mot juste 
-Quoting Revelations like a Southern Gothic reverend 
-David Cronenberg's "Videodrome" 
-Aspiring beyond the cross 
-Flesh as sartorial joy 
-Anti-Buddhism 
-A sniffling desire? 
-Human touch is next to godliness 

Text of poem: 

Paradiso XIV, 63 

Even in heaven, then, there is desire: 
for resurrection in the appointed time, 
when out of blackened earth new flesh will climb 
beyond the cross of every storm-whipped spire 
into that harmony kept by the choir 
assigned each soul, whose naked pantomime 
clothes itself there in joy, like sense in rhyme, 
like lyrics in the plucking of a lyre; 

for this, but also for the body’s own 
relentless, unrepentant want—to feel 
cool water on the brow, to bend and kneel 
within the house where skin and hair and bone 
meet in a smoky, sniffling, crassly real 
desire to live and not to be alone.