I'M BACK~ ~

Liveright 2018

ee ~

"To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

E  E     C  U  M  M  I  N  G  S

E.E. CUMMINGS 2 ~

I wasn't planning on another round of Cummings, but then a good friend in England, a poet, had seen I was reading through the new and hefty Complete Poems of Cummings, which by the way I don't own but borrow from an out of state library, three cheers for every librarian that is alive! and my friend wondered if this poem he remembers as a young man was in the book — Yes, it is — and since he doesn't have a copy, and I do, I can type it out just for him which is also just for you.

LVII

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

from  W [ ViVa ]

________________

E.E. Cummings

Complete Poems 1904-1962

Revised, corrected, and expanded edition

edited by George James Firmage

Liveright 2013

E.E. CUMMINGS ~

45



i love you much (most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

—sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year—

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearerness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love


from 95 Poems

____________________

E.E. Cummings
Complete Poems
1904-1962
revised, corrected, and expanded edition
edited by George James Firmage
Liveright, 2013

EARTH ~

Self-portrait with sketchpad, 1939, oil on canvas

love our so right
is , all (each thing
most lovely) sweet
things cannot spring
but we be they'll


some or if where
shall breathe a new
(silvery rare
goldenly so)
moon, she is you


nothing may, quite
your my (my your
and) self without,
completely dare
be beautiful


one if should sing
(at yes of day)
younger than young
bird first for joy,
he's  i  he's  i



__________________

E. E. Cummings
Xaipe
(Liveright, 1950)

fourth-dimensional abstraction

(E.E. Cummings)

_____________________________________________________

top painting by E.E. Cummings:

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Art Collection,
The University of Texas at Austin.