Explore "Baby" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ 1. The blue beginning of your eyes / Condenses the sprawling and assured / Blue with which the sky retreats / From those obscene confessions known as days.
/ 2. Again, your battling mites of blue / Try to stop the revolving monster of life / And find the indelible persuasiveness / Of single forms within the circling blur. / Sundered bits of a soul / Astonished at their shrunken estate, / They are not sure that they have still survived, / And plead for the conviction of sight.
/ 3. But when they recollect / The hugely placid manners / Of their life, before the earthly exile / Made them small and fastened / To one pathetic puzzle, / Their blue reverts to swelling reveries / Whose outward circles spurn the curtained jail.
/ 4. Upon your softly incomplete / Face, where germs of devils stir in curves / That tremble into questioning symmetries, / A thrust of darkness sometimes interferes / With secret, virgin places underneath / Your eyes and where your leaf-thin nostrils pause. / This darkness bends with helpless messages, / Like history admonishing a world / Personified in one, composite face.