The beautiful human race
Has something odd about its beauty:
The beauty of the face
Is always the same as the beauty of the body.
This is not possible.
Does this prove beauty is a miracle?
How does the beauty of the face and arm
Combine? Or love? Or do us harm?
Her body and her face exactly match in how much beauty they own,
As if the face with eyes and the blind body were both by the same God known.
Would you expect a beautiful neck on you,
If rounder, to be more respected?
Do you believe all differences are true?
The body has eyes the face does not,
Seeing into what is there, and what is not.
These beautiful fingers
Know what it is like
To move like a face
When someone has a face they like.
The body will always be beautiful
If the face is beautiful. The ratio is precise. How?
When we sleep, what do the nearly sleeping know?
When I desire to kiss her face,
I desire to kiss her body, too.
Beauty and desire were lost in a maze,
But led out by what a greater beauty knew.
She has a face I want to love with kisses, for hours,
But the body will run away.
The busy earth, too dark to see its flowers,
Turns brightly away as flowers face death.
Not once in the lingering spring
Did I feel on my face her beautiful breath.
Yesterday’s winds die
In a sweet continuum.
Her beautiful body and her beautiful face on her beautiful body cry.
The earth does not know its flowers.
But she does. Her body will stay.
Her face was respected
Before seeing the body,
Looking to lie there in that flowery place,
Next to my body and next to my face,
Everything in its place,
As the mind might do,
(You can lie there, too)
Even as she is sad and moody,
Obsessed with how limited time lives in infinite space.
Why is this always true?
As if the body and the face already knew?
How can great stretches of the known
And the unknown lie together?
How can the religious universe not know the spiritual weather?
How can the warm heart not know the face
Is cold, because it is thinking of space,
Which dies, though it goes on forever?
How do I reconcile my philosophy
With her face that doubts the weather?