VD Poetry

I'm double posting from my other blog, but I just love these poems, so it's worth sharing....

I'm not a fan of Valentine's Day, but it put me in mind of this poem by ee cummings, which is probably my favorite poem ever, notwithstanding my strange HS Freshman obsession with The Hollow Men and later love of Auden (who knew he had his own society?), being the gay. This poem, though, just gets me (and I have to admit, yes, I was introduced to it by a Woody Allen movie)

I've not really thought about it ever, but because you don't really need to know, if I were to list my favorite poems, the one below being at the top, they would probably be:

Desert Places - Robert Frost
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot
anyone lived in a pretty how town - ee cummings
Osso Buco - Billy Collins READ THIS POEM IF YOU DON'T KNOW HIS STUFF! Gorgeous!--excerpt:

But tonight, the lion of contentment
has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest,
and I can only close my eyes and listen
to the drums of woe throbbing in the distance
and the sound of my wife's laughter
on the telephone in the next room,
the woman who cooked the savory osso buco,
who pointed to show the butcher the ones she wanted.

Pretty greatest hits list, actually, but they're still wonderful. No revelations, but revelations. And this one, so succinct and bare and rich.

Feeling poetic today--maybe it's the rain.


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