Tribute Page 6
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 skillfully, 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 it's 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.
E. E. Cummings