nobody, not even the rain.

I should be sleeping: I have a full day of memory screenings tomorrow at a retirement home and the older folks deserve a cheery volunteer. But, as is often the case, I'm so at peace with my tea and honey (tonight with the Trapeze Swinger continuously looped, yep I'm a nerd but it makes me happy), I don't want to miss it by sleeping. And I've been thinking of an old poetry collection and want to set some of it down to remember. Tonight it's e.e. cummings, who's unparalleled for more than his adroit use of syntax. (Note: I prefer his darker pieces, but I'll share something more lovely here.)

I went home last weekend, a spontaneous decision spurred by Mom and Dad's willingness to spot me a ticket. Now I've developed a pretty sturdy resolve to make do with where I am, but you should have seen the glee set off by going home. I was ignoring Gainesville before I even left. By the time the plane descended toward the city I was wildly excited, heart thumping, face plastered to the window. It was expensive, it was a lot of travel, and it was heartbreaking to leave, but it was worth it to be that happy for those few days.

My parents drove 4 hours round-trip to pick me up, and again to drop me off. And while I was home, I wasn't really social. I did the usual things. Slept in, stayed too long over coffee and breakfast, played with the dog. Picked apples with Mom, helped make apple crisp while we watched a documentary I picked out with Dad. We ate dinner at the table together: wine, chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans. It was weird to be back. And it was so nice. To be not a kid again, but nothing more complicated than a daughter. To be covered by the company of two people I've loved all my life. What makes us whole isn't the valiant proclamation. In real love, proclamations rarely say anything we don't already know. It's the layering of love, insignificant moment upon insignificant moment.

This is what I have in mind posting this poem. It's also the poem that subserves my little collection of hand pictures. I know it's a "love-poem". But I think it also speaks about the love you have with anyone you know so well that all it takes is a look or gesture of theirs, something so familiar and practiced but it carries the weight of the hundred times you've seen it before. The meaning small things take on over so many repetitions. How the people we love open and close us with the smallest of hands.


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