Xli Poems/Portrait 1

by Edward Estlin Cummings

PORTRAITS I

conversation with my friend is particularlyto enjoy the composed sudden body atop which always quivers the electric Distinct face haughtily vital clinched in a swoon of synopsis

despite a sadistic modesty his mind is seen frequently fingering the exact beads of a faultless languor when invisibly consult with some delicious image the a little strolling lips and eyes inwardly crisping

for my friend, feeling is the sacred and agonizing proximity to its desire of a doomed impetuous acute sentience whose whitehot lips however suddenly approached may never quite taste the wine which their nearness evaporates

to think is the slippery contours of a vase inexpressibly fragile it is for the brain irrevocably frigid to touch a merest shape which however slenderly by it caressed will explode and spill the immediate imperceptible content

my friend's being, out of the spontaneous clumsy trivial acrobatic edgeless gesture of existence, continually whittles keen careful futile flowers

(isolating with perpetually meticulous concupiscence the bright large undeniable disease of Life, himself occasionally contrives an unreal precise intrinsic fragment of actuality),

an orchid whose velocity is sculptural