Body

If you mean to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.

O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!

SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING is something you know instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head at sixteen.

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises.

It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing. But often the shadow feels more real than the body.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain!

His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum.

The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.

I wish to make a noise with my feet. I want my soul to find its proper body.

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

The length of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height.

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

The soul has many motions, body one.

That inescapable animal walks with me. Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone.

It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Some thirty inches from my nose

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers, Leastways if you reckon two thumbs; Long ago he was one of the singers, But now he is one of the dumbs.

Let me have men about me that are fat;

Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?