The
spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders,
and all the rest
at night
in the black branches
in the morning
in
the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb
rough mattter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime
and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct
and
imagination
and the dark hug of time
sweetness
and tangibility
to
be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --
so
it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and
at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.