Journal of Sacred Work

   I was looking for poems about intimacy when it dawned on me. All poems are intimate. The better the poem, the more intimate, the more secrets to be shared. And like intimacy between those who love, the poem is a conversation between poet and reader. Here, for example, are the twin opening lines of an e.e. cummings poem I have referenced in a previous Journal entry. It is a poem first brought to my attention by Keith Hagan, M.D.:

somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

   Why would we travel together into a subject so personal that it may seem distant from everyday caregiving?…

   Caregiving, when born of love, is an intimate experience. The doctor reaches into a woman to help deliver her baby. And when the doctor makes this entry with love, he or she is entering the exquisite partnership that gives rise to birth.

   The loving nurse by the bedside of the patient in pain will reach right into the dark intimacy of that pain in an effort to ease it. We want help to climb out of our agony. That is the intimacy offered by a true caregiver.
   The loving chaplain by the bedside of a dying patient seeks to enter the patient’s spirit. In this intimacy, the chaplain supports the patient as body and spirit part ways.
    "…your eyes have their silence." And, still, your eyes will speak to anyone who is listening to their voice. I have looked into the eyes of patients struck mute by strokes and see their the voice of heartbreak and frustration. And who has not seen the song of wonder in the eyes of a tiny baby?
   In the next couplet of cummings’ poem, we feel the power of his words rising:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

   It is presumptuous on my part to offer anything but a personal interpretation of this brilliant expression by the poet. Lovers know the power of the "frail gesture" to "enclose." They know beyond knowing the challenge of touching that which is "too near." In cummings work we encounter language of searing intimacy.
   I will always believe that loving care calls us to the deepest kind of intimacy. Perhaps that is why it is so rare. To cultivate this intimacy, we must find the dedication to unravel the coded instructions of the great artists.
   Here is cummings poem in its entirety, to be read as a whole and line by line:

somewhere i have never traveled, 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

—

Spiritual Exercise:

Read this poem again now and again later in the day?

• • How does it appear to you in different moments?
  • Read just one line or one couplet and commit it to memory so that you may carry it with you as you care for others.
  • What effect does it have on your caregiving if you imagine the patient’s "intense fragility"

-Erie Chapman