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.