after sitting in silence for a while,
i recognise: i have been seized
by your particularity. you
are more than the sum of your
shapes, measures, colours, more than
your intercourse with soil and
stars. you are
no impression, cinematic; you are
not imagined. you are bodied and your
body somehow presses its being against
me, which, on a spring morning,
appears mutual.
what is it exactly that you perceive;
what do you know of me? of that,
i have no experience.
yet i cannot disintegrate the encounter—
therefore contend: the beauty of it
resides between us.
This poem is partly based on I and Thou, a book of philosophy written by Martin Buber,
originally published in 1923.