Saturday, April 16, 2016

I Grew Her Under My Heart...

      My gorgeous baby girl and her sweet husband going to a party.

THE SPIRIT IS TOO BLUNT AN INSTRUMENT

By Anne Stevenson


The spirit is too blunt an instrument 
to have made this baby. 
Nothing so unskilful as human passions 
could have managed the intricate 
exacting particulars: the tiny 
blind bones with their manipulating tendons, 
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient 
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae, 
the chain of the difficult spine. 

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent 
fingernails, the shell-like complexity 
of the ear, with its firm involutions 
concentric in miniature to minute 
ossicles. Imagine the 
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections 
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments 
through which the completed body 
already answers to the brain. 

Then name any passion or sentiment 
possessed of the simplest accuracy. 
No, no desire or affection could have done 
with practice what habit 
has done perfectly, indifferently, 
through the body's ignorant precision. 
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent 
love and despair and anxiety 
and their pain.


Anne Stevenson, "The Spirit is Too Blunt an Instrument" from Poems 1955-2005

2 comments:

Kelly said...

What a beautiful couple!

Marion said...

Thank you, Kelly. You're so sweet!! xo