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.