Let's have some Cummings, shall we?

I don't usually like to do this -- simply cut-and-paste a poem and pass it off as a post. Forgive me. But I've given much thought to this poem; in bed at night while resting a pillow by my head I have mulled over its meaning, its beauty, because it captures a rarity, an ideal, in a world of selfish conceit and absorption. It is Love, something which -- in poetry and in life -- is hard to get right. So I seize it while I can.


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 we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour 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