Ode to a Beautiful Nude

With a chaste heart - with pure eyes - I celebrate your beauty.
Holding the leash of blood so that it might leap out
and trace your outline while you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf,
in aromatic loam or in sea music
Beautiful nude -
Equally beautiful your feet
arched by primeval tap of wind and sound.
Your ears, small shells of the splendid American sea.
Your breasts, a level plenitude fulfilled by living light.
Your flying eyelids of wheat, revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes.
The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple,
Continues, separating your beauty down into two columns
Of burnished gold... fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises ..
Flowering fire... open chandelier,
a swelling fruit over the pact of sea and earth.
From what materials? agate? quartz? wheat? Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills.
The cleavage of one petal, sweet fruits of a deep velvet
until alone remained, astonished
the fine and firm feminine form.
It is not only light that falls over the world,
Spreading inside your body it΄s suffocated snow...
So much as clarity...taking it΄s leave of you
As if you were on fire from within.
The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Pablo Neruda