"nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility"

That's what ee cummings said. In whole, he said:

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

On the weekend I fell open, as I do. Now? Now I'm trying to shut again, to form the steel cladding that lets me batter through the difficulties in my life, to slice away tangental arcs with the laser of focus, to make myself into the enactor of my life instead of the receiver only.

Today has been strange. God has been coming to me all day, singing through me at work and on the evening walk home from school. I soar and dive through music and sunshowers, and my soul can be, while not wholly controlled, at least somewhat guided by my touch.

I remember that I am made of love. I have been so practical of late, all logistics and scheduling and risk-return calculations. My follies have been premeditated, consequences accepted before they begin, and the dangers constrained to reasonable limits.

Today the love is pouring out of me, and at the same time I'm trying to close up. A man in a maintenance coverall with the name "Krishna" on his tag told me to take off my coat because spring was coming. "Look," he said, "my coat's already off." It's a hard spring here though, and I need to keep going through it.

I was chatting online (o, how little sustenance that really is for a soul) last night with Andrew about dating patterns. I was more than a little cynical last night. Those phrases came back to me: the revolving door of my heart, my love's tendency to prey on the innocent. It's when I feel love in me the strongest that I worry about it the most: when my whole body is stood on edge, when I can feel ship's cables stretching out of my chest, when the skin on the back of my upper arms prickles and something dark sits in my throat. That's when I make poor decisions, it's when I surrender good sense, it's when the ground-glass dervish that serves me for a heart gets put between the millwheels once more. I'm no longer sure it's when I'm most alive.

I was circling in on somewhere within me but it's too dark for me to go there now. See, my focus is returning; I need to leave for school in 9 1/2 hours, I can't be self-indulgent. I'm treating myself like I would treat a lover: diverting, edging the mood up and away, distracting a little, not following it deep where damage might lie.

I'll leave you with Li-Young Lee, who in the poem which sticks to my thoughts more than any other, said

useless, useless . . .
your cries are song, my body’s not me . . .
no good . . . my idea
has evaporated . . . your hair is time, your thighs are song . . .
it had something to do
with death . . . it had something
to do with love.

It had something to do with death.

It had something to do with love.