With chaste heart, and pure <br />eyes <br />I celebrate you, my beauty, <br />restraining my blood <br />so that the line <br />surges and follows <br />your contour, <br />and you bed yourself in my verse, <br />as in woodland, or wave-spume: <br />earth's perfume, <br />sea's music. <br /> <br />Nakedly beautiful, <br />whether it is your feet, arching <br />at a primal touch <br />of sound or breeze, <br />or your ears, <br />tiny spiral shells <br />from the splendour of America's oceans. <br />Your breasts also, <br />of equal fullness, overflowing <br />with the living light <br />and, yes, <br />winged <br />your eyelids of silken corn <br />that disclose <br />or enclose <br />the deep twin landscapes of your eyes. <br /> <br />The line of your back <br />separating you <br />falls away into paler regions <br />then surges <br />to the smooth hemispheres <br />of an apple, <br />and goes splitting <br />your loveliness <br />into two pillars <br />of burnt gold, pure alabaster, <br />to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet, <br />from which, once more, lifts and takes fire <br />the double tree of your symmetry: <br />flower of fire, open circle of candles, <br />swollen fruit raised <br />over the meeting of earth and ocean. <br /> <br />Your body - from what substances <br />agate, quartz, ears of wheat, <br />did it flow, was it gathered, <br />rising like bread <br />in the warmth, <br />and signalling hills <br />silvered, <br />valleys of a single petal, sweetnesses <br />of velvet depth, <br />until the pure, fine, form of woman <br />thickened <br />and rested there? <br /> <br />It is not so much light that falls <br />over the world <br />extended by your body <br />its suffocating snow, <br />as brightness, pouring itself out of you, <br />as if you were <br />burning inside. <br /> <br />Under your skin the moon is alive<br /><br />Pablo Neruda<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ode-to-a-naked-beauty/
