confession

I think I need to break my ee cummings habit.

Mary Oliver is much, much safer. She anthems her heart out to an egalitarian classless world, surpassing the provincialism of cummings' seductive old-fashioned thous. Reading Oliver, I participate indiscriminately in loving Earth: owls, lilies, trees. This love is safe because it is not too deeply personal. I don't say this to belittle my enthusiasm for the "orange sticks of the sun," the "heaped ashes of the night," and the "dark hug of time," subjects so deftly illuminated when Oliver strikes her worded matches over them! But that enthusiasm is untainted by the longing that ee cummings stirs deep in my stomach with his language-powered emotional blender--longing for more than the fellowship of "the hummingbird in the summer rain shaking the water-sparks from its wings." Longing to possess the "fragile lips" that "usher the sweet small clumsy feet of April" into the "ragged meadows" of someone's soul. Longing for wooing and kisses and above all never to be a "deadfromtheneckup graduate" or a "Cambridge lady who lives in a furnished soul."

Both poets inspire me, but in different directions. I read Oliver and am inflamed with a zest to live a high life of wonder and witness. I read cummings and suddenly remember the becalmed seas of emotion residing within me, and this awareness alarms me into believing that a life bereft of a human love story cannot be complete.

To Oliver belongs the chanting of high priestesses, chaste and precious. To cummings, all the greed and ardor of an addict, grasping for experiences of deeper intensity.

Perhaps one day cummings will be safe for me. But for now, I think I'd best break the habit.