There is the navel that must be licked and the neck that must be kissed. First it is a stroke here, then a caress there. The camera clicks away and while the photographer says softly “do this” and “do that,” we enfold and unfold. Soon it is as if the photographer has faded away, such is the blinding power of passion.

The contours of her body are new territory and I explore them map-less, losing myself in her, wondering where she will lead me. Turning her over is like circumnavigating the world. I follow the curve of her hips to the crease of her spine to the cherished territory behind her ear. I am an explorer in the Rift Valley, wading through a dusty African riverbed, uncharted but certainly not desolate.

At first she is foreign, but in time mulling over her body I begin to recognize the paths and how they connect to each other and to her. And in the background – always – the cricket chirp of the camera’s shutter, holding us, capturing us, devouring us hungrily.

We are passing beyond the pale into the lands of desire where every touch, every move, every sigh is an anarchist’s pipe bomb thrown up against the plate-glass windows of convention. We hold in our hands the volatile forces of creation and destruction. At each step we are in danger of breaking irrevocably through to the other side, to a place from where there is no return.

We seek the Land of No-Return.

Life is not a sweet little picture of a house and a garden and a family playing on a swing, rather it is the raging storm that drives us from our homes, the wind that forces us from our course, the whirlpool that drags us to that breathless place — and it is the guttural explosion from within a woman’s body that is the birth of the universe.

We go back to this timeless place again and again because this is the explosion that began it all, clearly visible in the arching of a woman’s back that we captured on film.