Friday March 4 – “(i do not know what it is about you . . . .)”
One of the deep satisfactions about writing this Work Day/Hard Times poetry list comes from the variety of strong poems waiting to surprise me. There is a world of depth and play and grief and kinship waiting to be discovered or remembered and then offered to the c. 1900 readers of the list. The last three poems have been new to me. For this Friday in mid-winter (ok, late winter), I’m offering one of my longest places of beauty and wonder, a top five lifetime poem. It’s a love poem. The point of reading it out loud is that you slow down as you read, and that he hear the sensuality of the flow of the words.
I hope this winter day, that reading e e cummings makes you recognize your own beauty.
Have a blest weekend.
john sj
Today’s Post Somewhere e e cummings
Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
e e cummings
e e cummings 1953