forms and shapes and everything in between.

"Don't forget the poem on page 112. It reminds me of 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 will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfilly,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 is 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

-yes, another e e cummings, this one loved all the more because of its placement in a woody allen film.

I originally wanted to offer this poem and dissect it. But then I thought better of it. Mostly because I realize that I am such a dorky English major. But also because I don't think explicating the words here will actually end up expressing anything. That's so meta.

A mess of the senses, complete irrationality. A mess of punctuation and spelling, grammar and images, complete abandon for the clearly defined, the expected. Nothing is as anything ever said it would be. And while I might vacillate between two extremes, he opens me. He closes me. Those days of misunderstanding, of living up to some third party's expectations, are over. Just feel. Enclose and unclose. Just.

Words mean nothing. A frustration. Humans are so limited. I always have thought it funny that we assume we are highly evolved and that we are the end of evolution. But if you really look at us, our language, our communication, the main way that we are told we have to connect with others and create communities, is severely under-evolved. Not only that, but it is constantly devolving. Text messages and e-mails and the interjection of the word "like" into every valley girls' vocabulary. Or ask any Supreme Court justice or lawyer - the word is deceptive. It can mean multiple things, a mess of definitions. It can free a guilty man or persecute an innocent one.

So the law is not unlike love or friendship. We struggle against its futility, fight its limitations. But in the end our actions end up defining us. And the feelings that we get - those inexpressible waves of smiles and laughter and the uncontrollable tears - are the distillation of words. They are pure. Impossible to translate.

This is how he makes me feel. This is what he has made me realize. That is how I know that this means something. Because I could never explain what it means.