i remember an afternoon digging through my mother's old things [frayed scrapbooks, reams of paper, bits of photographs] and finding a notecard with a few lines of ee cummings written in ballpoint pen.
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose
i didn't know it was ee cummings then, i only reeled back with shocked delight, sucking in air. my mother! poetry! and a stanza as sultry and velvet as this one! i copied the lines down into my own notebook, keeping them, reading them at night after everyone was asleep.
this is how spring should feel: a close secret, a delight, a petal by petal moment that reveals just a little more beauty, a little more color until the whole world is alive and gasping for breath.
this is how spring should feel. but i'm in cleveland. and it's april. and it's snowing hard bitter pellets: the snow of february, not even the wet snow of spring.
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Yeah! Congrats (or condolences) on your entrance to the blogging world. I shall promptly add your RSS feed to my homepage.
Your mother has good taste. You/she quoted from the first poem I ever chose to memorize on my own.
The poem still makes me sigh, though it doesn't make me think about Cleveland.
-----------------
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
By the way, lb = your friend Lara [still at BYU], not some spammer spamming your blog with ee cummings.
despite my recent brain cell loss, i did figure that one out. you have my absolute not permission to post my feed on your homepage until you give me the url.
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