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Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

By Mary Oliver

The spirit
  likes to dress up like this:
   ten fingers,
   ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
  at night
   in the black branches,
     in the morning

in the blue branches
  of the world.
   It could float, of course,
     but would rather

plumb rough matter.
  Airy and shapeless thing,
   it needs
     the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
  the oceanic fluids;
   it needs the body’s world,
     instinct

and imagination
  and the dark hug of time,
   sweetness
     and tangibility,

to be understood,
  to be more than pure light
   that burns
     where no one is —

so it enters us —
  in the morning
   shines from brute comfort
     like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
  lights up the deep and wondrous
   drownings of the body
     like a star.