Elisa Breton

I can’t imagine any more beautiful way to be described by a lover…

He describes her body, but perhaps the illogic in his description is what makes the poem so deep and pure. I bolded my favorite parts in the poem.

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My wife whose hair is a brush fire Whose thoughts are summer lightning Whose waist is an hourglass Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut Whose tongue is an incredible stone My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows My wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs With steam on the windows My wife whose shoulders are champagne Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the ice My wife whose wrists are matches Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts Whose fingers are fresh cut hay My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit And Midsummer Night That are hedges of privet and resting places for sea snails Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea And a fusion of wheat and a mill Whose legs are spindles In the delicate movements of watches and despair My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders Whose feet are carved initials Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks My wife whose neck is fine milled barley Whose throat contains the Valley of God And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom My wife whose breasts are of night

And are undersea molehills And crucibles of rubies My wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight Is a giant talon My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight With a back of quicksilver And bright lights My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and white chalk And of a glass slipped through the fingers of someone who has just drunk My wife with the thighs of a skiff That are lustrous and feathered like arrows Stemmed with the light tailbones of a white peacock And imperceptible balance My wife whose rump is sandstone and flax Whose rump is the back of a swan and the spring My wife with the sex of an iris A mine and a platypus With the sex of an alga and old-fashioned candles My wife with the sex of a mirror My wife with eyes full of tears With eyes that are purple armour and a magnetized needle With eyes of savannahs With eyes full of water to drink in prisons My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the axe My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire