What Remains Valentine

What do I see

When I close my eyes

And the whole world disappears

A darkness tinged with the red 

Of distant fires at first

And then a black nothingness

As if drawn up from the depths

And me waiting for a single star

That must some day appear

Even if I only imagine it

Wandering invisible out there

Searching tirelessly for my sight

Craving my dim beholding

Of all its remaining light 

All Around Valentine

The body's along for the ride

On the soul's merry chase

But there's a hidden part of us

That watches from outside

We don't know what to call it

When at times it touches down

But feel it as a flowering

Something simple and profound

Or something that shouldn't happen

But does and stuns the soul

Some miraculous intervention 

The body returns from death

One more chance to fathom

What is living all around 

 

After Valentine

The day after a good rain

The world can begin again

The ever-hopeful sun

Hangs up its washed clouds

And everything green gets greener

Flapping in the breeze

Slowly the dashed peonies lift

Their sodden heads back up

Drying off from the dirt

Resuming the pleasure they take 

In giving themselves away 

Just put your face in one

You'll get heaven's drift

A small voice that pleads

What more could we have done

Waiting Valentine

Winding up in the desert

You can get a lot done

Waiting for the rain

Slowly the delusion

You are mortal gets burned away

By the meditative sun

Light and warmth that overwhelm

Erasing all the shadows

Even the soul evaporates

In the end lifting to the clouds

So when the rain does come

Like a war in heaven falling down

You feel your life come back to you

And the courage to go on 

Sunny Valentine

Looking through a lizard's eyes

Come out to dart along the wall

Myself a lizard I recognize

What was it I was looking for

 

A supper in the honeysuckle

A rendezvous in the bougainvilla

Hiding from the sudden sparrow

Thinking my lizard thoughts

 

Climbing upward to the warmth

Of this at last abundant sun

Till I can feel it in my blood

That even I am loved 

Iris Valentine

Purple yellow bright and pale

What became of the hundred iris

I planted against the house

I forgot to tell them

Every three or four years

You have to be dug up

The failing ones discarded

The becoming ones replanted

Who will take a year to bear

The most vibrant colors

Or you can just abandon them

Let them grow their own way

Pressing out into the grassy yard

Come on years later in the ruins 

Till All My Words Have Kissed Valentine

Gneiss is bliss

Come to rest

In something warm

And solid as a breast

You can lean into it

Like some part of you

You recovered missed

Bones answering to bones

Holding the world together

So contentment not get

Too hazy too relaxed

It forgets how to wrest

The hard thoughts from

The heart of the stone 

The Beautiful Water Valentine

Always feeling a little marooned

In our inner lives it's good

We have that island to return to

Safe from being rescued and

Dissolving back into it all

But it's all too much pretending 

We know what we're doing

When we can barely keep

Our heads above the beautiful water

After yet another shipwreck

This time crawling up on the rocks

Somehow I've managed to remember

How to build a signal-fire 

For the ships that pass me by

Or Maybe Valentine

Have you not noticed how time

Keeps claiming more and more space

One has the sense of some discovery 

Of some country overrun

Then time in retrograde motion

The sailing past of the past

Does all this not come to a cliff

At the lands-end of the universe

Or maybe it just circles back

Time bends and teeters on the brink

As it enters space stopping for a moment

In the yard where it leaves the air

Its shadow carrying that scent

You thought was lilacs

 

Whatever Happens Valentine

The means by which light is made

Implies the primacy of beings 

Who are so conscious and creative

They can manifest as galaxies

In the most artistic ways 

Light that never stops working

In the endless fields of darkness

Toward which it seems to be speeding

Confident it cannot will not

Be extinguished in the depths 

Certain even if all the lights go out

It will only take a moment

Before they all come on again

The gentlest among them

Has given its assurance and consent

Our Skin Is Our Largest Organ Valentine

Just a little prick

Then he shoves the needle in

And takes what looks

Like a staple-remover

Extracting the black dot

From the knee of my skin

And says we'll send it in

To be examined closely

By some experienced eye

That knows exactly what it is

It will take a week or so

I ask but he cannot tell me

Where it comes from

Or what it really wants

And all this with a grin

Twilight Valentine

Around the mineral body

Within the plant-like soul

Above the human animal

Works the spirit of it all

 

But only thoughts can feel it

When spirit speaks to spirit

Urgently yet tenderly

Like a mother's call

 

When at twilight all alone

She goes searching for her children

Come home come home to me

How I miss you all

Geometrical Valentine

I draw a line up

From the center of the earth

To the surrounding sky

Where it disappears

Among the flooding stars

I let it be the axis of my soul

The path the moon took

Birthing this ethereal world

I let it be the big hand

Of what time is for

The possibilities of turning

From nothing into something

And then again to nothing 

The spirit building at its core

Unstoppable Valentine

A lovely pushy soprano

Before she could be stopped

Sang Schubert for us

Her whole body an instrument

For some unleashing force

Not entirely natural

But entirely possessed her

So overcome that flesh and blood

Could hold a note so strong so long

But that diva would not be stopped

She threw the patient scientists

Off the stage she put the stunned

Philosophers in their place 

She had to be carried out

By ten burly men in the end

And sent trilling down the street

Idyl of the Afterlife Valentine

In the end we're given a garden

And told to start again

Coming at it from the other side

Of the lit air and rain 

Blue and yellow bearing green

The true color of the soul

Settling over the earth 

The falling dew of stars

Where we're told to wash our feet 

And given hoes and rakes

And the few handfuls of seeds

We've saved from perishing

And told to get to work

The fields await your ravishing