Where Valentine

The woman in the next room

Is screaming and screaming 

Non-stop for hours and hours

How is this humanly possible

Terror screams rage screams

Some so high-pitched they

Passover into silence

For a few blessed seconds

Flooding back even louder

More heartrending

More earth-shattering

Screams for help that never comes

Screams refusing it when it does

Where is the medicine for her grief

My sorrow that it isn't me

The doctor that can heal us both

The More Valentine

The more the light increases

The more the darkness deepens 

It rocks us back and forth

Until what's held so tightly

In the earth loosens into leaves

Some argument between them

Gets settled slowly into flowers

About to break their branches

Something given is received

But it hardly lasts a week

This eternal spring

Unconquerable spring

Re-imaging everything

In the passing of an hour

Proven Valentine

I love the way dead friends

Come back for a visit in dreams

Picking up where we left off

As if death never happened

Or at least didn't change between us 

Anything that mattered

And yet we're not the same

Some of us have put on weight

Some of us grown thin as light 

Last night lovely Judy long gone

Out of the blue appeared 

Scrolling back through her life

She came to me to prove

Love is no memory

It goes on living still

And kissed me on the cheek

Windy Valentine

Here in the desert instead of snow

A cooling calm descends

More like sleep than death

The tall saguaros climbing Calvaries

Stop to catch their breath

Until the Feast of Gabriel blows

The winds out of the west

And rain like mercy flows

Into the veins of stones

And out of a darkened sky

A few days of glory bloom 

But only if in your heart

Now broken battered bruised

You have left it room 

To give you back the sun

Taken Valentine

It takes a soaring eagle

To grasp a hare's life

It takes the scent

Of lilacs to be swallowed

It takes a winter to reduce 

Whole libraries to a few

Empty endless pages

Daring to be written on

But why did it take so long

Centuries I waited for me

To rest my head on your arm

If death is short and love

Is long then let it take 

All the spring it needs 

For us to wake

They Know Valentine

A  cargo of middle-aged mothers

And a sleepy old man in the front seat

Traveling with the destinies

Of their children in their hearts

From a meeting of schools and teachers

Reminiscing when they were girls

Running to catch the phone

Gabbing with girlfriends for hours 

Laughing about the tricks they played

Each with a saga to tell

In the struggle to grow up

And the comfort of being friends 

They know how much the world depends

On childhood and a child

The wonder in their faces

Their warm embraces and first words

Maybe Valentine

Condensing down as we all have been

From star to star over millennia

Will these bodies not become stones 

To one another in the end

Mountains to be clambered over

Will we block our way

Moving forward as a whole

Or they say not at all

But we are all still children

Holding on to our mother's hand

Who doesn't see the car coming 

Or maybe the light of the stars

We once were is just arriving

So we can quickly get across

Hurried by angels as in the pictures

People of the Heart Valentine (for Lee)

To me it all says

Be! Be!

But who made being

Forms transform 

Only the road stays road

And the task of finding

A few companions to walk with

Even if only for short distances

And a fleeting conversation

Thank God time is a fiction

His emissaries impose on us

From which we can now and then

Escape into that eternal moment

That still comes and goes

In us and between us

Afterwards Valentine

It was still spring

When he returned 

Exuberant spring

Overwhelming him

For days he sat in wonderment

Getting as far as a stump

In the yard to watch

A raft of stars descend

As if to carry him away

Until he had achieved

A stillness next to death

Just to feel again and again

Its overcoming the passing through

Apparent in every leaf and stem

The Seventh Day Valentine

There's something so child-like

About this curious old man

Still willing to follow birds

To find his own way

Sneaking around the castle's

Dark halls and locked doors

Into all the forbidden places

This holder of secrets now 

Who must be imprisoned

At the gates of heaven 

How he loved the music

The dancing and the sailing

This tired little boy

Who just wants to go home

The Sixth Day Valentine

An egg becomes a bird

Bursting forth cooked and burnt

Whose ashes deposit two

Tiny figures that fed on blood

Start to grow into king and queen

It all goes back to memory

The first magic show

A house of mirrors where

The sun burns out the sun 

The sadness of metaphors

That we can only approximate 

What's really going on in us

We sleep on mysteries 

Until the calling of the dawn

The Fifth Day Valentine

The first formulations of the idea

Of a physical-magical cosmos

Love took for its thesis

It would share its existence

Out to the smallest things

In a continuing evanescence

It would walk the world 

Storing its misgivings

In beautiful all bodies

And fall asleep in the earth

Dying into its creations

Over and over again

Giving birth to a child

While remaining a virgin

The Fourth Day Valentine

Here we enter another world

Half-sensual half-sublime

Christ pulls back his veil

Revealing still more lives

Seven little ships carrying coffins 

Sail out on a dark lake

A transformation underway

After which one hopes

Nothing will be the same

Some power still lingers

Don't you feel it in the pictures

He has painted and left behind

Real water in this fountain

Poured from a living mind

The Third Day Valentine

 Before there can be a wedding

There must be a weighing of our love 

How much of it is self-desire

And how much the real fire

How much a feather can tip the scales 

To prove the phony and the liar

The stupid who play the gods for fools

And find yourself among them

Before there can be a wedding

There must be romance the unraveling 

Of unsolvable riddles

In someone else's face 

A cup must be passed

The taste of tears and laughter