Body

License my roving hands, and let them go,

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

Some thirty inches from my nose

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

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

Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right.

Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever.

Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs the matchless and pure strength of faith.

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.

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.

And you want to travel with her And you want to travel blind And you know that she will trust you For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We come from not being and march toward not being: nothing between two nothings, zero between two zeros, and since between two nothings nothing can be, let’s drink to the splendor of not being our bodies.

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.

The soul has many motions, body one.

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!

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands