Poetry Man

The college girls at the next table were talking poetry, and to my surprise, I could follow all they said. They discussed the sorrow of Sylvia Plath, the emotions of Robert Frost, and the passion of ee cummings. I knew them all, not because I loved or even read poetry, but because Celtic Woman had read them to me as we lay in bed late at night. Sometimes we made love with poetic words swimming in our heads as our bodies surged toward each other.
While the girls next to me discussed their poetry course, I remembered my own journey. As a young man, I thought poetry was for sissies. I had to read it in school and it literally just bounced off my hard head, never to sink in or even make an impact. I was going to be a man of science, and had no need for such sentimentality. Then I met Celtic Woman, a poet at heart, who had dozens of poems memorized and even wrote some herself. I was amazed when she recited poems I had actually read before in school, and yet had remained unmoved. She would read to me, her voice low, putting real emotion into the words and phrases, and new feelings just flooded into me.
When she whispered them by candlelight in bed, the writers seemed so wise, and wrote with such feeling, that I wondered just how shallow I had been as a young man to be unaffected by such beautiful words. I realized that for me, poetry had to be said, not read. I had to hear it to understand it, to feel it; and it was her sweet voice that opened my mind to such feelings.
I would tease her in bed sometimes. I told her she would have to whisper the lines of an erotic poem to me one night as we made love. She laughed and giggled back that when we made love she could barely speak more than the one syllable words we whispered in passion, never mind recite an intimate poem.
One night we were locked together, deep in passion, and I whispered in her ear that she had to say an erotic verse. She just moaned softly. I slowed down, letting her catch her breath, and asked her again. She breathlessly whispered into my ear:
 
"but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close."