What Valentine

A country can be taken to be

A single personality whose cells

And parts work on mechanically

Somewhere after thirty

The biography shifts

And all that was gained

Or lost in childhood

Slithers toward Jerusalem

Never was a town more taken

Apart and patched together

The city of a personality

A mother and a child

What does the world hate more

I ask you fathers

In Valentine

The why is in the how

The when is in the where

The that is in the this

And I am in your arms

This is my philosophy today

Holding and being held

Its central theme and mood

Of which there is never enough

Good news bad news

Both excuse embrace

Freely given freely received

In which whole bodies

Listen closely to each other's

Hearts thrumming in unison

The grief is in the joy

November Valentine

It's good I have a spare life

When this one has to go

My dreamed me at night

Where strangely I feel

More alive than in this one

And where I wake to a world

Hardening out of that one

It can be dizzying at times

Going back and forth

Whoever I am in my dream

Always seems the better me

Someone I would like to be

More honest and more brave

Fallen but getting up

Short Course Of My Loves Valentine

Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley

Compose the underbelly

Of modern poetry

They speak again in Yeats

Who looked like Blake

And swore like Baudelaire

Who kept the flame alive

Even as it consumed him

I imagine the poets on earth

Meeting up annually with those

Who go on writing them in heaven

Where they all get drunk together

Taxied home by their angels

Muttering their dreams

Your Valentine

My boundless pride

Is always quarreling

With my inadequate humility

Like anxious parents

Over their restless ego child

Who must be torn apart

Needing them both

And needing to escape them both

But the child must be rich

And prodigal before it crosses

The sixty leagues of love

It must lose all its hopes

And laughter except

This last one you

Still Singing Valentine

Three tasks the heart is gifted

To think to feel to act

And occasionally to sing together

When the spirit lifts its baton

And some new strain dips down

Into the corporeal brain

A gold glimmer come and gone

Of light becoming song

That stuns and thrills

But never lasts too long

But just enough to hear

They're still singing us into being

That whole orchestra of gods

On this ordinary morning

What Fall Is For Valentine

Narrow my yard

Weedy my head

The flowers final hours

My two trees stare

At one another lovers

Tearing off their clothes

Let's make a child

Let's make another world

Let's sink our teeth

In the pomegranate's flesh

And lay our bodies down

Exhausted in the grass

Now we know that death's a ruse

And only love will last

The Phoenix Valentine

The Phoenix is a made-up bird

The fierce head of an eagle

The brilliant colors of a pheasant

The wide wingspread of an angel

Can't you see it's love's emblem

Bathed and burning in the fire

Of its own freeing destruction

Every evening smouldering to ashes

Which the earth gladly accepts

And carries to its central source

Every dawn it's sent

Aloft again however love

Construes it even now

It's kindling its assumption

In your heart's imminent flight

Peering Valentine

On one of the pick flagstones

A cricket is leaping and leaping

As if it was a trampoline

And it a little girl bouncing

Bouncing and laughing

Or bouncing and weeping

I can't tell if it's joy or woe

Thrown off with each ascension

But for a moment they relinquish

Their bodies and hang suspended

Defying the will of the world

A little higher and higher each time

Peering over the edge of something

That feels sublime

Taken Valentine

On this blue morning sky

A child of chance has drawn

Behold a five-pointed star

From contrails and clouds

Slowly forming slowly fading

Each of its lines breaking off

In different directions 

The way a soul falls apart

Disappearing over the entrance

Of a deeper world

Someone has taken his star

And gone back to being

A clear blue sky

Another morning making

Earth's Valentine

Now we come to the part

In the twisting mystery of man

Where everyone meets

Everyone else even if only

In a mute introductory way

After our long divorce

We are starting to come back

To this sweet earth

With fewer and fewer

Misconceptions about what

We are doing here

It's still early days

But darkness can only deepen

Into light what else

Was it born to be

Stillness At Last Valentine

What the gods had in mind

In their enthusiasm and confidence

When they decided to hurl themselves

Out of the darkness of blissful love

And dissolve in a fiery mist

Was us and not just us

Even this day they thought of though

And how far their light could travel

Into falling leaves and dying flowers

Until it reaches the flesh and blood

I get to call my separate self

I turn back to remember

Those first few days of being held

That first sublime October

Boundless Valentine

The sequences of slavery

Are not mocked they fall

On to limbs these chains

No mercy for the blind

The first is merely the delusion

I can rape and kill you

Terrorize you into a submission

So complete you thank me

But there are so many other ways

Of binding and being bound
The appearance of this world

Just the last frontier last gasp

Where freedom takes its stand

In seeing I was always free

Mythological Valentine

The first time I saw the Mississippi 

Was from a hillside above Genoa

Wisconsin on a visit on a whim

To my genius friend struggling

For a place for his brilliance

To land he had found the story

Of Gilgamesh and planned

To make a modern movie of it

He showed me his first magical slides

And played me the synthesized

Music that would accompany them

All I remember is one

Of a wheelchair flying over the moon

Whatever that could mean

He had a flair for irony

A startling wit and a taste

For drinking me under the table

He traveled the country until

We lost track of one another

But then years later he called

Drunk in the middle of the night

Lost and crying incoherently

Until I had to hang up on him

And weep for Enkidu dying