GBMD: 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 will easily 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

--e.e. cummings

I will admit to having a quite personal reason for treasuring this poem: back when I was madly in love with my husband and he was not in love with me (that would be our sophomore year in college) he gave me this poem. Now, I know a love poem when I see one, and I refused to believe it meant nothing. Maybe that's why I was able to outlast the others who had designs on his heart. 

The photograph is of what I believe to be a Johnson's geranium, growing wild near an abandoned settlement in Newfoundland.