Birds Valentine

I heard the birds disagreeing
in my backyard tree
loud and shrill it was speech
not song it sounded Corinthian
or Apollonian I get confused.

Outside of lovers one
never hears our original tongue
anymore those five-
shapely tones from which
there are easily now
twelve baskets left over.

As my lover the air
likes to say the languages
are dying one by one
until only love is spoken.

Smiling Moon Valentine

If not there as a memory
there would be darkness
subconsciously at first
growing out into the world
as if it was a sense organ.

To feel the fullness of the life
of the invisible beings around us
if it weren’t for selfishness
and the stubborn refusal to admit
the spiritual nature of all ideas.

If not there as an emptiness
sight and thought given back to the world
please take off your clothes
as little as you belong to the stars
that little you belong to the earth.

Secret Valentine

Is it the poet’s secret wish
to have the last word
or the first word or
be the everything
of our prevision we like

him least for?
Emerson speaks
as of a divine being
who’s left his glasses
on the other floor.

Now we’ve begun
to make life we see
how it’s the failure
of a trillion words
prepares the resurrection.

Beggar's Valentine

That a man have to beg
for a job for his own
survival only a cactus
has such thoughts

Pushed from the top of itself
overflowing rows of small clasps
in the shapes of water crystals
that take hold of you perfectly

This morning he woke up hopeless
he told me he’d suck it up by ten o’clock
and be on to something else by then
he just wanted to talk but it would pass.

Gusty Valentine

The three Marias
I call them
the rare red-flowered Clivia
she of unfortunate
Kaffir Lily fame

I grew from five seeds
through forty-eight weeks
of moist dark wombs
and now a five year wait
for a flower I’ve never seen

I sit in the yard
gusty winds new moon
moving into her old address
the wind throws the last oranges
down to me.

Wildflowers Valentine

That they’re fixed in beauty
and cannot think
or change a lot
or those in desire fixed
aroused (but) not (yet) wakened

How gold feels inside
not what we’ve turned it into
a joy that is a residue
of pleasure or a pleasure
that is a reservoir of joy

The extinction of certain feelings
mirrored in species decline
for which we must create
internal gardens
forests that live inside.

Questioning Valentine

We humans are the true religion
of the gods
can you imagine
we are what they love
and serve?

And not to be discouraged
or to feel hopeless at all
so confident in their own
capacity for giving
themselves completely are they?

So they could be a conscience
and how many lifetimes did they labor
building a whole new pyramid
for each of us
in honor of our being born?

Sentient Valentine

A soul in service
to its loves and hates
with a (now for some
head-work) mind in service
to such a soul

A soul who serves beauty
mostly before truth as if
a life without memory
or memory’s spectacles
could anymore exist

But that first pleasure
to eat and know
to be free
beyond what one knows
and still loves.

Lantana Valentine

The lantana I took in
after my neighbor left continues
to hum to me

it’s now a small child
more and more of what I needed
appears in

in umbels those rosettes
desire creating divinity pauses
leaning on the banister

of the spiral it undresses
the most naked of things
and better than reason.

Soul's Valentine

You know what
unfortunately sentient
difficulties the clown

more than any other species
remains safe on the cool
damp slopes of moon roads

where we take a final look
at building up the different
reasons for ourselves the others

you’re watching what’s
coming up next with
such wild velocity I’m

the upward stroke
of lightening after it
touches down

on stone and pottery
and the great bend
in the inevitable institution

not to mention the whales
the shipping gear
and you know what.

Certain Valentine

How far we’ve come
to reach such distances
between us
by which I gauge
how much we must
have loved in the old
sense one another
before our coils
woke us up on the wrong
side of the future
i.e. the past
which cares not
at all about corruption
or beauty except as the
envelope and construct
reality is stuffed with
but I forgive you
seeing what flesh is put to
to explain I am just the world
in its certain aspect as you.

Pursued Di Valentine

The garden is glowing this morning
with an alarmingly attractive light
the pulling in of you
by what is beautiful and laughs
and therefore only half
a glass of truth at a time
the impermanent part
by what is it pursued
princess by his own
hounds and torn
fire into water into airy
song the garden
is so bright tonight
I’ve brought my own darkness along.

Sunday Valentine

That it must build
to a mountain of expectation
from a mole hole of
disappointment we never

hear crows here but
this morning that unretractable
auguring caw caw caw
next door

something in the walls
wakes me three hours
after I got up

dreaming envoy I
mustering his ships
to kiss your pyramidal far-off face.

Cooing Valentine

The camera doesn’t take
the picture no more

no more than the words
take the poem there

is a flapping in the leaves
spring cognitions so

I love you uncognitionally
as I was designed to do

coos of satisfaction
why are you mourning

but you did leave me my life
empty of life

when the corpse flowers
you know it’s life

the same flapping of cars
one street over.

Amaryllis Valentine

Amaryllis flower bud
reach for the red in
the brick chimney
in the painting above you

but to die after you flower
wasn’t enough for us
I had to leave you here
by the side of the road

for a series of passionate
mumblings and disgrace
each in our own graceful way
spring speaks against

openly in the street
pale blue pale green
rather homeless in heaven
than a billionaire on earth.

Disaster Valentine

Here in the last few days before the disaster
when the whole world gets to play its
non-speaking part in our national reenactment
of how a titanic economy hits the iceberg
of reality and sinks with all the poor onboard
and a few of the rich onboard some country
music playing here in the last dim days before
the disaster I stand in my own backyard
while I still have a backyard its own private
quadrant of stars and debris and compost
which is which to have taken the world
like rotten apples thrown against a wall
to have driven it all into the ground
or to have eaten our own children?

Untitled Tintype By Unknown Photographer, No Date Given Valentine

Now our children no longer die
so young as often before
we forget to notice
how we go on losing them
by failing to grasp them
or some all at once betrayal
that snaps the heart
in those first years
revealing your absence
there in the shadows mother
father how was I more a part
of your marriage than you
of my childhood
and yet it happened
never feeling felt
I could not trust myself
or you or anyone
I could not love
until I drove you off.

Falling Valentine

Falling through the table
falling through the floor
I fell through dirt and stones
through the dead
through caves and great rivers
all kinds of twittering evil
past Persephone her stinking beauty
past Pluto his hall of mirrors
through the hollow space
at the core of myself
(I saw in passing it was me)
into the captured sun raging
at the axis of the earth
the will of all things
where three old men were singing
in the flames
fear doubt hate
they welcomed me
how many years
the flames they ate me
but now I’ve come back to you
and you as if only a moment had passed
lord of my soul
run to take me into your arms….

Millennial Valentine

Actually I’ve been preparing
for the next millennium
when the richness of time and life’s
unpredictable moral surfaces
will have separated out
the radical curmudgeons and the
bouncing balls from the specific
eternities the gas station’s
plastic flowers from the quaint
seasons preserved in minds
when slowly the moon will have come back
inside us to illuminate our feelings from within
which we’ll call morning
new morning and new night
and sex the last thing to come
will have been the first thing to go
everyone pregnant with themselves
alive in themselves or not
reflecting the sunlight or not
you will see it in our faces
you will see in our suffering
our shared hunger as true friends or not.

Valentine Under the Influence of Orange Blossoms

Lizards come to the compost pile
I meet them there for a rest
their flame bodies lick
the block wall
I think it best we expect to
misunderstand one another
haven’t we learned that much
and to start over
apologetically we’ve been
coming at this from different antelopes
parts of the trunk
have just bare wood showing
so it hurts to hear it
he said the first spirit I’d see
would be myself
and not at my best
for one drop of water
the fox sparrow lands
then flies off again
in your big toe sleeps
your whole destiny
if you say Jesus Christ
is your personal lord and savior
then you’d love everyone
but you don’t.