Touch

“Touch …. communicates in a way that exceeds or transcends reduction to verbalization. Touch, then, never occurs uninterpreted (and therefore unmediated by language), but it escapes total translation into words. Right when words fail, touch becomes a major expression of extreme feelings ranging from aggression to intimacy.

– Paula Cooey

The act of touching another, in which what is touched is sensed only as itself touching, establishes a circuit of exchanges in which two become one flesh and each becomes part of the other. Because this reaches into dimensions of our being that only an occasional poet or singers have been able to articulate, we should not think of this exchange as a form of communication so much as a form of communion..

– Donn Welton

The last light of day crept away like a drunkard after gin
A hint of chanted prayer now whispers from the fresh night wind
To this shattered heart and soul held together by habit and skin
And this half-gnawed bone of apprehension
Buried in my brain
As I don’t feel your touch, again.

– Bruce Cockburn

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