Wealth & Money Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Desire is usually sold as appetite, but Brooks flips it into metaphysics. Loving a man, she suggests, doesn’t sharpen the eye so much as dissolve it: the body stops being a set of borders and becomes weather. That opening move - “more than a body” - rejects the tidy romance of possession. The beloved isn’t something you hold; he’s something that changes what you can see and breathe.

The language performs the very blurring it describes. “Physical limbs expand” is an almost comic overstatement, then comes the real trick: “his outline recedes, vanishes.” Brooks stages love as a perceptual event, not a moral one. The man grows by losing edges. He becomes “rich and sweet and right,” a trio that sounds child-simple, even suspiciously absolute, as if the speaker is catching herself in the intoxication of certainty. “Right” is the giveaway: love doesn’t just aestheticize; it authorizes. It rewrites judgment.

Then Brooks widens the frame to the elements - atmosphere, blue sky, blue water - and suddenly the beloved is not elevated above the world but folded into it. The subtext is both rapture and risk: when someone becomes the climate, you stop noticing the air until it’s gone. For a Black woman poet writing in a century that policed bodies and narrowed interiority, the passage also reads as a quiet insistence that intimate feeling can be vast, philosophical, and cosmological - not merely private, not merely “domestic,” but as big as the color of the day.