Bly locates this hunger in the body before he locates it in the psyche, and that sequence matters. The body lacks salt, water, protein — the image is of actual deficit, not symbolic absence. What is starving will eventually consume itself; the organism that cannot find what it needs turns on its own tissue. The metaphor is unsparing because the reality it names is unsparing.

What runs beneath the passage is a longing that has no visible object it can possess. The hungry son circles older men the way the homeless circle soup kitchens — not because the older man can give him what he needs, but because proximity is the only strategy available when the real provision was never made. And Bly knows this circling fails. The shame he names is "nameless, bitter, unexpungeable" — three adjectives that refuse the consolation arc. It cannot be washed out because it is not guilt over an action; it is the shame of a condition, of needing what one was not given and having no dignified way to ask for it.

The desire here points back to an origin that no subsequent relationship can substitute for. That is the trap built into this particular longing: it is structural, not circumstantial, which means each new older man encountered carries a weight he was never meant to bear, and the hunger remains when he inevitably fails to satisfy it.