It's a little after 6am on the west coast, where I've awoken this morning after a long day of travel and some failed attempts at airport blogging. (I read a novel and a play on the way out yesterday). Today we finish our trip to the site of Brian and Sky's wedding in the Methau valley in Washington State, and I've been asked to read something. This particular poem is very popular one, and I understand why--i find it unfailingly lovely, and I'
m thrilled to be reading about this kind of love at a wedding rather any of those old "Love is" cliches that I frankly found it hard to avoid when trying to pick out wedding readings to suggest. So, without further adieu, courtesy of our old friend e.e.:

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.