Spy Poetry: Touch Me by Stanley Kunitz

Editor’s Note: This is one of my all-time favorite poems, so tender and wistful, so filled with “mono no aware,”  a Japanese aesthetic term meaning “the poignant awareness of impermanence.” I had the pleasure of seeing Kunitz at the Dodge Poetry Festival a couple of years before he died. I remember sitting under a small tent on the grounds of Waterloo Village in New Jersey and talking to us about the magic and power of words. He was a very thin man and at that time in his late 90s. As he talked about a favorite word that he used in his poem “End of Summer,” he fluttered his long delicate fingers in the air as if trying to enact its meaning. The word was “perturbation.” I’ve yet to use it in a poem of mine but keep it hopefully stored in my mental inventory. I took a picture of him that day, gently gesticulating, and I keep it pressed in my favorite book of his, The Wild Braid.

Touch Me 

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) was a highly acclaimed American poet who served as the U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry twice, in 1974-1976 and again in 2000-2001. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, Selected Poems, 1928-1958. Kunitz also served as the New York State Poet from 1987-1989 and was a dedicated educator, teaching at multiple universities. He was appointed the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2000 at the age of 95 and held numerous other prestigious positions throughout his long career. In addition to his Selected Poems, 1928-1958, other notable collections include Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, and The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz. He received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal.