Poem Beginning with a Line by Milosz

“The most beautiful bodies are like transparent glass.”

They are bodies of the selfless or of those newly

dead. What appears transparent is really flame

burning so brightly it appears like glass. What

you’re looking through is the act of giving: One

thing in life needed desperately, given to another,

or perhaps life itself. The most beautiful bodies

are not transparent, but sometimes the color

of lead, like the elephant whom a child with some

peanuts lifts by the trunk in his hand in the swirling

dust, so that it appears he has lifted a monument

or a city with all its pain. The bodies that seem

transparent are made of an ice so pure it appears

to be glass sweating, where you, desiring another,

glimpse your own face that weighs nothing and is burning.