Love Quote by Karl Shapiro

Shapiro stages intimacy like a clockmaker of the body, turning a lover into both an object of wonder and a living metronome. “Exquisite breathing” is a surgical phrase for something usually described in soft-focus terms; it doesn’t just flatter, it measures. The lover’s smile arrives “with satisfaction of love,” a line that refuses the melodrama of passion and instead dwells on the quieter afterglow: the moment when desire has done its work and leaves behind calm, almost domestic certainty.

Then Shapiro tilts the scene into uncanny precision: “I touch you again as you tick in the silence.” The verb “tick” makes the body mechanical, but not cold. It’s a way of hearing life in the smallest motions - pulse, breath, the tiny internal clicks of someone drifting off. Silence isn’t emptiness here; it’s the amplification chamber where those micro-sounds become proof of presence. The speaker “touch[es] you again” not to ignite, but to confirm: you are still here, still warm, still time-bound.

In context, Shapiro’s mid-century sensibility often marries the sensual to the observational, even the clinical. This feels like a postwar lyric temperament: tenderness haunted by awareness of mortality and the fragility of peace. Love isn’t only rapture; it’s vigilance. The subtext is that sleep resembles disappearance, so touch becomes a small act of keeping time, keeping faith, keeping someone from slipping into the dark unremarked.