By Denise Levertov
Your beauty, which I lost sight of once
for a long time, is long,
not symmetrical, and wears
the earth colors that make me see it.
A long beauty, what is that?
A song
that can be sung over and over,
long notes or long bones.
Love is a landscape the long mountains
define but don’t
shut off from the
unseeable distance.
In fall, in fall,
your trees stretch
their long arms in sleeves
of earth-red and
sky-yellow, a little
lop-sided. I take
long walks among them. The grapes
that need frost to ripen them
are amber and grow deep in the
hedge, half-concealed,
the way your beauty grows in long tendrils
half in darkness.
Paris Review issue no. 27 (Winter–Spring 1962)
For Shay’s Word Garden
qbit 
Love is lopsided…like long bones. I like that.
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I love this poem. I had not read it before, so thanks for the introduction.
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Thank you! I never read it either, although I have her collected works. Levertov was my gateway drug into writing poetry. I was not the same person after the first time I read “O Taste and See.” It was one of those moments that changed everything for me.
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Got to love that!
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This is so beautiful. Thanks for sharing it.
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Levertov was pivotal in my early poetry exploration. This is a stunning one. You can always tell the best poets because, as here, they know how to end their poem with a perfectly crafted flourish that makes the entire thing blaze.
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