Poem (The spirit likes to dress up...)

The poem

The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morning

in the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would rather

plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body's world, instinct

and imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,

to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is --

so it enters us -- in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;

and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.