I have a poem stuck in my head.

Whenever I’m quiet, or still, there it is.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:

During meditation, it comes up. I notice that it’s there and continue on. Label it. Sit with it. It’s like the patter of rain. Not interrupting, just present.

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

I’ll sit at my desk and listen to the birds outside and another line will catch at me.

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,

It will find it’s way in in the space between my thoughts of the day, of prosaic necessities like grocery lists and phone calls.

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

 And sometimes I let it in, more than just a burst of a line or two. After all, who shuts poetry out of her life?

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;

But other times I do. I close the door and shake off the lines. I straighten up and fly right. I dot my “i” and cross my “t” and get on with it.

But poetry, to the silly hearted and the dreamers among us, is persistent. It doesn’t go quietly into that good night. It returns from where we have never travelled to tell us more. To whisper to us things we have forgotten:

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

For those of us, the silly hearted, the dreamers, the jugglers of words and tellers of tales, the poetry cannot stay away. It needs us; we need it. It’s in us. It is us:

(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

{lines taken from somewhere i have never travelled by e.e. cummings.}

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