8. Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body

HOW can we find? how can we rest? how can

We, being gods, win joy, or peace, being man?

We, the gaunt zanies of a witless Fate,

Forget the moment ere the moment slips,

Kiss with blind lips that seek beyond the lips,

Who want, and know not what we want, and cry

With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by.

Love’s for completeness! No perfection grows

’Twixt leg, and arm, elbow, and ear, and nose,

And joint, and socket; but unsatisfied

Sprawling desires, shapeless, perverse, denied.

Finger with finger wreathes; we love, and gape,

Fantastic shape to mazed fantastic shape,

Straggling, irregular, perplexed, embossed,

Grotesquely twined, extravagantly lost

By crescive paths and strange protuberant ways

From sanity and from wholeness and from grace.

How can love triumph, how can solace be,

Where fever turns toward fever, knee toward knee?

Could we but fill to harmony, and dwell

Simple as our thought and as perfectible,

Rise disentangled from humanity

Strange whole and new into simplicity,

Grow to a radiant round love, and bear

Unfluctuant passion for some perfect sphere,

Love moon to moon unquestioning, and be

Like the star Lunisequa, steadfastly

Following the round clear orb of her delight,

Patiently ever, through the eternal night!