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.