Ode to a naked beauty.

With chaste heart, and pure

eyes

I celebrate you, my beauty,

restraining my blood

so that the line

surges and follows

your 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, arching

at a primal touch

of sound or breeze,

or your ears,

tiny spiral shells

from the splendour of America's oceans.

Your breasts also,

of equal fullness, overflowing

with the living light

and, yes,

winged

your eyelids of silken corn

that disclose

or enclose

the deep twin landscapes of your eyes.

The line of your back

separating you

falls away into paler regions

then surges

to the smooth hemispheres

of an apple,

and goes splitting

your loveliness

into two pillars

of burnt gold, pure alabaster,

to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet,

from which, once more, lifts and takes fire

the double tree of your symmetry:

flower of fire, open circle of candles,

swollen fruit raised

over the meeting of earth and ocean.

Your body - from what substances

agate, quartz, ears of wheat,

did it flow, was it gathered,

rising like bread

in the warmth,

and signalling hills

silvered,

valleys of a single petal, sweetnesses

of velvet depth,

until the pure, fine, form of woman

thickened

and rested there?

It is not so much light that falls

over the world

extended by your body

its suffocating snow,

as brightness, pouring itself out of you,

as if you were

burning inside.

Under your skin the moon is alive.