Edward Estlin Cummings, had a way with words I could only wish to have.
Most certainly my favorite poet.
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 you wish 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 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
Selected Poems 1994 pg 65
what time is it?it is by every star
a different time,and each most falsely true;
or so subhuman superminds declare
-nor all their times encompass me and you:
when are we never,but forever now
(hosts of eternity;not guests of seem)
believe me,dear,clocks have enough to do
without confusing timelessness and time.
Time cannnot children,poets,lovers tell-
measure imagine,mystery,a kiss
-not though mankind would rather know than feel;
mistrusting utterly that timelessness
whose absence would make your whole life and my
(and infinite out) merely to undie
- E.e Cummings
Selected Poems 1994 pg 101-2
Spring is like perhaps a hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look( while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and
without breaking anything.
-E.e Cummings
Selected Poems 1994 pg 20-21
it is so long since my heart has been with yours
shut by our mingling arms through
a darkness where new lights begin and
increase,
since your mind has walked into
my kiss as a stranger
into the streets and colours of a town-
that i have perhaps forgotten
how,always(from
these hurrying crudities
of blood and flesh)Love
coins His most gradual gesture,
and whittles life to eternity
-after which our separating selves become museums
filled with skilfully stuffed memories
- E.e Cummings
Selected Poems 1994 pg 68
