(the closest to swooning that I can get on here)

Beautiful! I'm especially enamoured of cummings' take on romantic posessiveness, and the Stevens poem begs to be read aloud.

I'll parry with my own most favorite love poem by Alexander Pushkin. When I first read it in high school I only saw the surface melodrama. Now that I'm older and (hopefully) wiser, I can see that my affinity to this poem was a foreshadowing of borderline destructive co-dependency to come...

I loved you; even now I may confess,

Some embers of my love their fire retain;

But do not let it cause you more distress,

I do not want to sadden you again.

Hopeless and tonguetied, yet I loved you dearly

With pangs the jealous and the timid know;

So tenderly I loved you, so sincerely,

I pray God grant another love you so.

I now think of it as the "I CURSE you with my love!" poem.

I know that Puskin poem! I took Russian in college and my professor had us read that one. I remember thinking, oh my god, this is so romantic and sad and tortured! Very Bronte-like in its pathos. I adore that shit, at least in writing. In reality, not one little bit. I never liked feeling that way, nor did I like having someone feel that way about me.

A few years ago, I got to see the actor Anthony Zerbie recite E.E. Cummings poetry. It was a small theater and he was walking around, being a bit whacky, I think deliberately, since one can't be in a terribly linear frame of mind to either recite or to listen to Cummings. Zerbie liked to pick out people in the auidence to focus upon when he was reciting the poems, which was pretty funny to watch. And I'm sure it kept him entertained. There was a group of faculty wives in the front row, and when he began the poem "The ladies of Cambridge live in furnished souls..." his eyes went back and forth across that row. Ouch. They didn't get it, however. This is probably my vanity, entirely, but I swear he honed in on me (there was a man right behind me, I checked later) when he recited this poem. Afterwards, I probably would have stripped naked for him on the spot, had he asked me. And Zerbie is kind of old and not that great looking, but a good actor can do that to you...

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