8:43pm Full Belly

Dear A,

I love e.e. cummings and I don't understand him at all. Reading his poetry is like looking into a kaleidoscope. You know that there is something there, but the images shift and change so frequently that there is nothing solid or tangible to hold onto. Cummings frustrates me to no end because I can't make sense of hardly anything he writes, but at the same time, I keep coming back to him because his words are so beautifully colorful it's hard to look away.

Here is one of his poems that has been puzzling me lately:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis 

I think what he is saying here is that, when it comes to matters of the heart, sometimes you can't think everything through. The person who worries about what everything is and means "will never wholly kiss you." Sometimes the flutter of an eyelash is better than, or says more than, any words ever could. 

It's the last two lines that give me the most trouble though. "Life is not a paragraph," meaning it can't be looked at logically with a clear beginning and end and a well-developed topic? Something like that, maybe. But "death is no parenthesis" is something I think I'll never understand. What is death, then? A period? A question mark?

I don't like to think about death because it scares me, but I'd like to hope it is a period. 

Love, M