Two clinical vignettes are presented to illustrate the value of thinking about desire in terms of body experience and its multiplicity of potential meanings to both the analyst and analysand. An intersubjective perspective is used to frame the material and critique biological and cultural models of desire. Shifting versions of the play and interplay of passionate experience are unfolded using an amalgam of concepts and metaphors taken from the work of Daniel Stern, Chodorow, Dimen, Lacan, Massey, Bakhtin and the unique experience of this author with the performance of jazz. This pastiche of perspectives highlights the complexity and uncertainty and, therefore, the slipperiness of desire in order to address the difficulties with using theory that does not capture these dimensions for use in the rapidly changing and multiply layered arena of clinical action.