somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

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

This is one of my favorite poems in life. Not only for the strong impressionistic imagery, the jamming of the punctuation but for the triumph of softness over hardness. Look: frail, gesture, slightest, petal, heart, flower, snow, rain, small – these things are the undoing of unclose, closed, close, and shut – they get in. He has never been here before, it is beyond anything he has ever known and it is good. I love the specificity of the line “as when the heart of this flower imagines/ the snow carefully everywhere descending” – the specific flower of Spring imagining not only Winter but a careful everywhere of snow (how can it be careful? Yet it is somehow, that silent falling). The combinations of words that he uses such as: “intense fragility” really capture something for me - a precious, breathless, don’t move, don’t touch, momentary, heartbreaking snowflake perfection – all of these things. I could go on and on.

I think of this poem every time I am in a car and it starts to rain. Those first few drops on the windscreen, when they hit and break, I always say “cat-paws,” because that is what they look like to me - the small hands of the rain.

No place for poetry

I make the critical error of talking about poetry at work with Melissa and them I’m fucked, surrounded as I am by paper clips, message pads, minutia and my own ennui. Talking about poetry and art and ideas at work can actually hurt when you aren’t a poet or an artist or a scholar – they make you forget your place, or maybe put you in it.
From about the age of 11 I used to meet my mother in the kitchen at 3:00 am (I come from a long line of practiced insomniacs) and sometimes we would trade poems. We would read each other our favorite passages and thrill at the sharing of the words and the cadence and that perfect truth expressed by another human that made us feel somehow finally understood. This was wonderful. I would go back to bed and think, “I never need to sleep again.” I would be full of racing thoughts and images and fleeting snatches of perfect understanding that I would never, ever, be able to communicate later.
The time for poetry is Saturday afternoon - when the house is clean, when you can make a long-distance phone call that inadvertently lasts 6 hours, when you can drink too much and say too much and then apologize and sleep it off. Poetry is a distilled and spare and heady truth that may cause me to quit my job or never, ever, sleep again.

In no order other than that which comes from my fingers now: Yeats, Emily Dickinson (and for being a shut-in), e.e. cummings (and for using all lower case), Michael Ondaatje, Charles Bukowski (and for staying lucid long enough to write any of it down, for not losing the scraps of paper under the sofa and for the title “Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit”), and all the others - recited to me haltingly by impassioned others, or read to me by my mother at 3:00 am. Thank you.