the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

 
Today I listened to a compilation CD called “When a man loves a woman”, and there were some great renditions including those familiar soulful songs by Percy Sledge and Otis Redding (who’d been loving her too long/to stop now).  And today I decided to add a couple more poems by another man whose lyric love has always moved me.  The first speaks to any of us who have tried to capture in words what cannot be captured, and the second is one of the loveliest extended metaphors I know.

And so, for your reading (and viewing and listening) pleasure, here’s the work of the inimitable lower case edward estlin cummings, known as e. e.  Read first:

If I have made,my lady,intricate

If I have made,my lady,intricate

imperfect various things chiefly which wrong

your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail)

songs less firm than your body's whitest song

upon my mind--if I have failed to snare

the glance too shy--if through my singing slips

the very skilful strangeness of your smile

the keen primeval silence of your hair

--let the world say "his most wise music stole

nothing from death"--

                    you only will create

(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:

lady through whose profound and fragile lips

the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

into the ragged meadow of my soul.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

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 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 

Here and here and here are links to readings of somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond, the first by a young, probably Israeli, soldier, the second by cummings himself, and the third by a man whose voice I feel I know but whose name I don't.  

Enjoy.