Blog Poetry Slam

February 2, 2008

Apparently today is Blog Poetry Slam Day and so I chose this poem by e.e. cummings because it is one of my absolute favorites, and also in memory of our friend randy landry, who once rewrote this whole poem with a few changes and claimed it as his own ("I did not copy it from e.e. cummings!"), and who made the last line, "No one, not even the snow, has such fragile wrists."

[somewhere i have never travelled]

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