Michael McClure's poem begins by shouting a question and then answering it with an old-fashioned "NAY." Has the speaker forgotten beauty? No. His attention has simply moved from the cherry blossom to a human body. The central idea is that the body deserves the same close, reverent looking we give to flowers, and that this looking is a kind of learning. The speaker calls himself "a scholar," and his subject is a lover.
The opening sets up an odd mixture of registers. "Yea! Yea!" and "NAY:" sound like a pulpit or an old Bible, and the speaker addresses his lover as "thy perfect body." Yet the first thing he offers as proof of his love of beauty is a botanist's description: "five petalled white cherry blossom / tinged with pink -- and the yellow stamen." The counting of petals and the naming of the stamen make this the language of careful study. Beauty here is something you notice in detail. When the speaker says he has become "engrossed," he means absorbed, as a reader is absorbed in a text.
Then the voice changes. "Thy" becomes "your," and the grand gestures give way to plain, short sentences: "The length of your legs. / The solidity of your thighs. / The brightness of your eyes. / Your fingers. Hands." These are fragments, with no verbs and no flourish, and they read like entries in an inventory. "Solidity" is an unexpectedly unromantic word, closer to sculpture or geometry than to a love song. It treats the body as something with weight and substance. The poem also quietly rhymes "thighs" with "eyes," so the physical and the luminous share a sound. The last two items, "Fingers. Hands.", shrink to single words, as if the speaker is slowing down to stare at smaller and smaller details.
The poem's boldest moment is typographical: "BIG SIMPLE IDEAS / in / the / BOOK OF FLESH." The capitals make the phrase loud, and stacking the small words down the page forces a slow, stepping pace, so we hear each word separately. The phrase is also a small paradox. Ideas are usually thought to belong to the mind and flesh to the body, but here the flesh is a book, and its ideas are "big" and "simple" at once. This links back to the title, *Airs from a Forgotten Book 3*. The number suggests one piece in a series, and "airs" can mean both tunes and breaths of atmosphere. It is tempting to read the "forgotten book" as the very "BOOK OF FLESH" that the speaker now studies, a text the intellect has neglected. That is an inference, but the echo between the two "books" seems deliberate.
Then comes the joke: "I'm a scholar." The contraction is casual and the line is deadpan. After all the capitals and the ceremonial "thy," the speaker puffs himself up and undercuts himself in the same breath. He is serious about the body, but he can laugh at how a bookish pose sounds when applied to desire. The humour keeps the praise from turning into mere worship.
The ending drops the volume completely: "Faint scent of pussywillows / seen gray through dew." There is no verb, no "I," and no capitals, only an image. It also mixes the senses, since a scent is "seen," as though smelling and seeing had merged. Pussywillows and cherry blossom are both spring plants, so the poem ends back in the natural world it started in, only now softer, grayer and more hushed. The body in the middle of the poem seems to belong to this same world, and the shouting gives way to a quiet that feels like contentment.
What makes the poem interesting is how much it does in so little space. In about twenty lines it moves from biblical exclamation to a plain list, then to joking self-description and finally to a still image. It argues, without ever explaining itself, that tenderness, intellect, humour and physical desire do not have to be kept in separate rooms.