Poetic

Le Coeur
Henri Matisse, French, 1869-1954

This is my contribution to today's offering of Poetry Corner at If I Ran The Zoo. I found this poem and the artwork I'm posting with it in one of my "Desert Island Books:" Art & Love: An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry, put out by the Met Museum of Art. 150 poets matched with pieces from the musem.

My first, first (and to date only) produced play was originally named after this poem. I changed the title, but it still contains a scene where a character quotes:

somewhere i have never travelled

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

E.E. CUMMINGS, American, 1894-1962

The Garden at Vaucresson
Edouard Vuillard, French
1923 and 1937.