With chaste heart, and pureeyesI celebrate you, my beauty,restraining my bloodso that the linesurges and followsyour contour,and you bed yourself in my verse,as in woodland, or wave-spume:earth's perfume,sea's music.
Nakedly beautiful,whether it is your feet, archingat a primal touchof sound or breeze,or your ears,tiny spiral shellsfrom the splendour of America's oceans.
Your breasts also,of equal fullness, overflowingwith the living lightand, yes,wingedyour eyelids of silken cornthat discloseor enclosethe deep twin landscapes of your eyes.
The line of your backseparating youfalls away into paler regionsthen surgesto the smooth hemispheresof an apple,and goes splittingyour lovelinessinto two pillarsof burnt gold, pure alabaster,to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet,from which, once more, lifts and takes firethe double tree of your symmetry:flower of fire, open circle of candles,swollen fruit raisedover the meeting of earth and ocean.
Your body - from what substancesagate, quartz, ears of wheat,did it flow, was it gathered,rising like breadin the warmth,and signalling hillssilvered,valleys of a single petal, sweetnessesof velvet depth,until the pure, fine, form of womanthickenedand rested there?
It is not so much light that fallsover the worldextended by your bodyits suffocating snow,as brightness, pouring itself out of you, as if you wereburning inside.
Under your skin the moon is alive.
