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

Around the corner,
a blast of blue
comes screaming
just outside the coffee house.

A small boy,
no more than five,
is a beaming
chocolate goatee
from the local ice-cream parlor.

A woman chases him
with the exasperated look
of a mother on a date
with her son
.

Her eyes still red
from her four hours
of sleep,
but her smile:
as big as her son’s.

She catches him as he stops
at the smell
of fresh chocolate chip cookies
emanating from the coffee house.

Her motion is quick
and calculated
as she turns him around,
zips his jacket,
& kisses his forehead.

She takes his hand
and they are off.

I assume they live happily
ever after.

The storms of late summer did not snap
and surge. The pepper plants did not 
kneel , weary, beneath the rains 
that came
and came.

(or was it a drenched swoon of devotion?)

You didn't hurt my feelings
in an otherwise unremarkable moment
and I didn't react with silence.

I didn't cradle that silence like
a delicate, damaged thing.
(the bird that each of us
tries to save—
shoebox, eyedropper;
our mothers knew it would die,
but let us figure it out)

I didn't have myself convinced
that no one had ever hurt like this.

My silence didn't get deeper.

You didn't wade through it to get to the door.