To Praise
By Ellen Bass

I want to praise bodies
nerves and synapses
the impulse that travels the spine
    like a Maserati

I want to praise the mouth
that lair where the tongue reclines
and the tongue, a bear
    roused in spring

I want to praise hands
those architects that create us anew
fingers, cartographers, revealing
    who can become
and palms, priestesses
    worshipping the long slow curve

I want to praise muscle
and the heart, that flamboyant champion
    with its insistent pelting like
    tropical rain

Hair, the sweep of it
    a breeze

and feet, arch taut
    stretching like cats

I want to praise the face, engraved
like a river bed; it breaks open like
    morning

Breasts, triumphant as
Handel's Messiah
    the nipples rising

and clitoris, burning
    like the sun in a Wyoming sky

I want to praise the love cries
sharp, brilliant as ice
and the roar that swells in the lungs
    like an avalanche

I want to praise the gush, the hot
spring thaw of it, the rivers
    wild with it

Bodies, our extravagant bodies
    how you have lavished
    yours upon mine

I read this poem in the anthology, A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women's Poetry (Calyx Books 2002). If you're wondering about breasts triumphant as Handel's Messiah, you can listen here. If you'd like to feel better about the blazon, know that Shakespeare preferred "real girls" and have a giggle at Camille Guthrie's My Boyfriend, which praises "buttocks like a fleet antelope's" and "a penis like overnight mail."