When the heart grows quiet, desire still whispers. Touch Me is a love song to memory, longing, and the brave music that still plays within.
Touch Me
Stanley Kunita
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.
Reflection:
In Touch Me, Stanley Kunitz stands at the edge of summer and the threshold of old age. The poem blends the beauty of the natural world with the vulnerability of human emotion—desire, longing, the bittersweet ache of memory. Even as the seasons shift and the body slows, the heart remains wild and yearning. Kunitz reminds us that within the quiet, we still carry the music of youth and love. The line “remind me who I am” is not just a plea to a spouse—it’s a universal cry to be seen, to be touched, to still matter. This is a poem not of fading, but of fierce inner life. In the creaking of the timbers and the willow’s thrashing, life pulses. Memory may flutter like leaves in wind, but love—love remains.
Three Questions to Dive Deeper:
- What moments or memories from your own life echo the emotional shift between summer and fall in this poem?
- How does Kunitz use nature—the crickets, the willow, the storm—to mirror inner feelings of desire and aging?
- Who or what helps you remember who you truly are when life becomes quiet, uncertain, or overwhelming?