Friday, April 4, 2025

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

Thursday, April 3, 2025

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

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

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

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

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

Monday, March 31, 2025

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

Sunday, March 30, 2025

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

Friday, March 28, 2025

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

Thursday, March 27, 2025

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

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

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

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

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

Monday, March 24, 2025

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

Sunday, March 23, 2025

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

Saturday, March 22, 2025

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

Friday, March 21, 2025

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