Mood: Ready for the day to end
Drinking: I’ve emptied the bottle
My list of favorite poets is very, very short. Back in high school, we dutifully covered the Maya Angelous and the Emily Dickinsons and I was mildly intrigued by Robert Frost and his two roads in a yellow woods somewhere.
But, all in all I found poetry to be either cloying and claustrophic or ridiculous and arrogant, and I wasn’t rushing out to stock my shelves with anybody’s chapbook. And then I was ambushed by Bukowski and Blackman, and suddenly my shelves started filling up.
Recently I’ve become increasingly enamoured of e.e.cummings. It all started when the lovely S quoted this line: “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
The line is so shockingly beautiful that I found myself mumbling it under my breath at all hours. So I went out and bought myself the $33 volume of e.e. cummings’ complete poems, 1904-1962, so I could touch the page and read the words whenever I wanted.
If I ever write a line half as lovely, I can die happy…
“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”
-Lo, who loves the rain and all its tiny hands
LaDonnaWitmer 