Yehuda Amichai and horse chestnuts

The way a photographer, when he sets up     
a shot of sea or desert out to the edge of the horizon,     
has to get something large and close-up into the picture—     
a branch, a chair, a boulder, the corner of a house,     
to get a sense of the infinite, and he forgets about the sea     
and the desert—that’s how I love you, your hand,     
your face, your hair, your nearby voice,     
and I forget the everlasting distance and the endless endings.     
And when we die, again there will be only sea and desert     
and the God we so loved to look at from the window.     
Peace, peace to the far and the near, to the true Gods, peace.

From Yehuda Amichai, “The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds,” (Stanza 7)

I've been really enjoying getting packages in my pigeonhole this term - mostly they are things I've bought myself: a pair of trousers, some rosehip oil, a corduroy dungaree dress that I haven't stopped wearing since I've got it, 'I, Coriander' because it's a good book, and 'The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai'. When I first got Amichai's book, I flipped open to a page titled The Language of Love and Tea with Roasted Almonds and read and resonated.

It's funny, that in some ways love is like poetry and in other ways love is so very far away from poetry. On a walk with Jacob, we stopped underneath a horse chestnut tree and, knowing that I collect a conker to represent each year in Cambridge we peered through the grass to find the perfect one for this year. He did find the perfect one and put it carefully in my hand - poetic. But later on when he found another conker and split it open we talked about how its inside looked like a brain, and then talked about dissection experiments in school - unpoetic. Still love.

Or tonight - dinner and talking about where we'd be in ten years and eating chocolate. Poetic. And then him dropping his fork and me nicking myself with his knife. Unpoetic. And then him getting Savlon and a plaster. Unpoetic? And me fumbling with the plaster and him sticking it carefully on. Poetic? Lines blur -- I sound like one of those confused literary critics but poetry perhaps isn't so easily defined.