Always one sensation when I see

A woman who is beautiful alone.

Always – as if in another place

Part of me were falling endlessly

Through clouds in an amorphous hidden zone.

Always beauty. Always one pure face

Slaps me like a hand. Is it just me

Whom the vision transforms into stone?

Everything around me slows its pace

As if it agreed that she might be

Why being feels. Why feeling has this tone

Of missing something it cannot replace.

 

Is someone immune? Are some of you

Able to pass by those you desire

Without leaving part of you behind?

Can it be the beautiful is true

And the world is false? Love does require

Passionate response. Were you designed

To contain emotion, always new,

As if you could casually admire

Your own deepest need? My unconfined

Heart observes as if I always knew

This woman. Before the stars caught fire,

When feelings were a jumble, still combined.

 

Hopeless, what we offer is sincerest.

The glamorous require frequent

Tributes from the people they displace.

If beauty can arrest us with its merest

Hint, its possibility or scent,

Just imagination of a face,

Is love then the farthest or the nearest?

Is the beautiful what distance meant

By assigning everything a place?

Our humiliation becomes clearest

When despair takes joy on its descent.

When rejected, ours is no disgrace.

 

Some have said that beauty will be how

In the end absurdity makes sense.

The exquisite draws beings to a stand.

What we think we know should not allow

One image to remain, remain intense

When the thing is gone – you understand

Because a sunset happens even now

That was in your youth. Experience

Goes beyond five senses in this land,

This country where all women take a vow

To the infinite – at their expense

Obey its inarticulate command.

 

What is love if we have not confessed it?

Cowardice, or deeply held respect?

And why does the need for love insist?

The heart hopes for a crisis that would test it,

Never knowing what it may expect.

That is also how we too exist.

Our best art could never have expressed it,

How beauty can harm us, its effect

On the endless longing we resist.

No one lacking beauty has possessed it,

Even when she ceases to object,

Kisses us, and lets herself be kissed.

 

Music reaches us – before we hear it,

Noise around us vibrates in a throng

Of agitation – nothing seems to guide it.

Then a tone emerges and can clear it-

Self out of the background, so a song

Finds a steady updraft and can ride it.

Beauty does this for us, making Spirit

Suddenly remember it is strong.

Beauty is like Spirit but beside it,

Almost touching, infinitely near it.

Without beauty, every day seems long.

 

Those who suffer homeless in the cold,

Burning rags and garbage to stay warm –

Who have faces altered by disease

Or whose bodies do not fit the mold

Their culture says is beautiful, whose form

Makes them jokes, the people others tease –

Those whose skin is wrinkled and can fold

On itself, whose spines at last deform

Into a curve, who cough, convulse and wheeze –

Who were once desired, now grown old –

Life torments them until they transform.

Do they shine inside? Yea, even these?

 

Earlier than everything we sense,

In the shadow world before we are,

Silence taught the nothing how to shout.

We treat beauty with a great pretense

Though the land it rules is very far –

Do even the stars live so far out?

Beauty is unlike our own existence,

Neither ordinary nor bizarre.

Everything we see has come about

Because Spirit has no good defense

Against beauty, which we only mar,

And must usually live without.