Read Valentine

A close reading of the leaf
Of your palm reveals
A breezy life
 
You are gifted and drowsy
Often at the right moments
But on your other hand
 
I see a difficult winter coming
And the leafless tree
Of your life-line riven
 
After its gold glory
Thin and shivering
One magic hand rubbing the other
 
Taking you so far inside yourself
You come back on a breeze
By the tips of your fingers

When Valentine

When it comes to power and love
When it comes to the power of power
And the love of love
 
The true task of the collective
Is to safeguard each unit
As the treasure within it
 
We are a migratory species
And insist on intermingling
Which arouses all sorts of hostility
 
But it’s the thing that still might save us
Or so I hold out my arms to my almighty
Wonder at the perseverance
 
Of the power of love when it comes
Up against the love
Of all power

Fall Valentine

The fall is finally pregnant with the spring
You can feel it quicken and turn and kick
The winter has grown so fat
 
In her mind she’s made
A diamond of the purest
Moral clarity and calm
 
And placed it down upon the town
Which slowly melts it back
To its accustomed black
 
All that tends toward leaving
And all that wants to stay
It takes a summer to enact
 
But you need a shore-line for that
And a child who comes to play
A life-time to unpack

Traveling Valentine

X x’s x in the sky this morning
Contrails headed for Australia or Guam
A thin bedspread of clouds left behind
 
I never know if I’m awake or asleep
When I’m in travel mode
Leaving my old life behind
 
Trusting there is always someone stronger
Living inside me I travel to meet
Or yet again pass by
 
Certain he or she is out there
And our time in London will be brief
A memory even before it happens
 
And of course I bring you back with me
To an already overcrowded household of clouds
Slowly my accumulating love

But Valentine

Freedom is going through
Another bad divorce
And of course the kids are the losers
 
But love gets along in the little towns
As equally in the big towns
I travel helplessly around
 
The world struggling in my head
Like a quarrelsome family
Hard to believe we’ve the same parents
 
But taken individually
We each seem splendid
Except for the unloved parts
 
We trade places for a while
Passing on the street
But we hardly notice it

Narrow Escape Valentine

When I hear a ladder creaking
Up against my neighbor’s house
In lovely late October
 
I know he’s hanging out
Strings of bright orange
Lights along the roof-line
 
Turning his yard into a crypt
The decorations of death for his
Annual Halloween party
 
When the souls of the dead enter
Carrying their own heads
And are laughed at and mocked
 
He doesn’t invite me the devil
But comes to warn me of the noise
It will all be over by three o’clock

Tony’s Valentine

Why not take a short-cut
Into heaven in these last days
When the wildest specters come
 
And if there is a heaven
You win by smiling
It will have to take us in
 
Weren’t these the conditions
If we were to participate in this life
The contracts signed in heaven
 
Before we could agree to come here
That heaven would be forever
In our debt an unforgivable
 
Mortgage of misery

Only a heaven

Could absolve

Did You Think Valentine

I’m looking for a new pronoun
To inscribe the collected works
Of an old love how old is love
 
Did you think I wouldn’t know you
But someone had to preserve the old ways
Of speaking into the pleasure between us
 
And long-toothed silence
Had to soften dare I say it
Into the hands of distance
 
The love for which we live
And lived daily until
We knew why we lived
 
So we could continue to live
Into that new pronoun
That holds us both and all

Caravan Valentine

Are we gifted according to our pain
No more than we can handle
Is that really true 
 
A kind of modulated terror
We can only tolerate and improve
With artful forgetting
 
Of what just happened
In the evolution of memory
Us here to live one life
 
Far more than we can handle
And so returns in a series
Of infinite regressions
 
According to the mathematicians
Who say we’re almost halfway there
But cannot tell us to where

Birthed Valentine

Even a womb is a dead-end
We must turn out of it
Drive on to another bent road
 
Surely you can feel the hurrying will
The multiplicity that moves us on
Against the unity of the little self
 
I thank heaven we’re not in charge
Of our destinies yet that other forces
Annotate our lives with their histories
 
But if you wake up in some womb
Call me baby
I’m coming soon
 
And if the sea is lapping your feet
And you have turned around
Your face arriving first

Temperamental Valentine

I’m a sanguine choleric mostly
With collapses of melancholia
And outbursts of inertia
 
But then there’s that fifth temperament
Of the post-structuralist heart
Full of its new aspirations
 
To which we are all tempted
Even if we’re not aware of it
Or actively fight against it
 
If the soul can’t quite work
On itself from inside itself
It must look elsewhere
 
For direction to perfection
Deeper than temperament
Or particular tribe

Post-Communion Valentine

Now that you’ve finished with the explanation
You can embark on the question
You can sit down with yourself just the two of you
 
To long to get to the practical heart
Of these connections that come and go
Your angel responsible among them
 
Did you ever just meet with
Someone who hated you at first sight
Or someone who poured out their heart
 
And there was no posturing or guile
At least for a while
So I come to the question
 
What is it we fear
When we get near
Other fearing hearts

Life Interview Valentine

You need to know
This conversation is being taped
And I will be taking notes
 
Already I can sense your attention
Fading at the intersection
Of your eyes and ears
 
You need to choose your pauses
Carefully anticipating how
They may be used against you
 
Of course this is not a court of law
Or any kind of inquest
Into your remaining astonishment
 
But things are delicate and you
My friend have been found
Hanging by a thread

Surviving Valentine

When it’s not mating season
It doesn’t take a Darwin to notice
The finches have more freedom
 
Because the truth is
They’re still in the childhood
Of their extinction
 
They fly like they’re about
To make another leap
Out of the dinosaurs of heaven
 
But one day isn’t long enough
To play with God and air and act
Like they have something to share
 
With us urban binoculared ones
Who scout their redness
And its fading out

We Are All Homeless Valentine

Her thoughts were circular
Her heart was squared-off
Her will was a solid wall
 
Equally for and against herself
She couldn’t disguise
And went on eating rotten apples
 
Waiting for her Steve to return
What is suffering anyway
If it won’t matter how much
 
You suffered if not for the love
Of some Steve with the pure
Piety of a child
 
So tears come swiftly to you
Watching her die
But she is not crying at all

American Valentine

We think because the architecture is modern
We’re no longer medieval
Hiding in our mental huts
 
We think because we read the Bible
Emerson and Twain
We’ve overcome the tribal
 
Something in us always needing
A revival or the recitation of a pledge
The downfall of a rival
 
What interests us most is the matter
Of money its potential for cruelty
The cost of our survival
 
Still the raucous teenager of the world
Still yet to prove our love and freedom
Are more than drivel

Second Valentine

The first and last animal
We must put out of ourselves
Is of course the great beast
 
And losing most of its ballast
Lift off airborne our souls
Into a host of monarchs
 
We must extricate our powers
Of misperception from
The deception of our senses
 
While yet grounded
See into other worlds
And search for home among them
 
We must prepare the air
For the second coming of ourselves
A mind that loves

Returning Valentine

The arrival of the blood summer
In the brown-eyed fall
Finally convinced us of it all
 
All we could agree on
There was a child to feed
The wailing winter come
 
For such dreamless sleep
We thought she’d died
Wrapped in her starry blanket
 
Years borne like children
Who eagerly leave home
Some never heard from again
 
But one who returned
Unburdened and uncrowned
When you were found

Conquered Valentine

Ancient mariners sail
Up from the flooded yard
Crossing the patio sea
 
An armada of snails
Close-hauled spinnakers flying
Until soon I am surrounded
 
They make their first engagement
Ascending the towers of my legs
Losing many brave in the assault
 
But slowly I’m encompassed
Reborn as the snail man
They’ve always wanted to become
 
Risen to walk the world
Trailing a wake of slime
With an iridescent gleam

Closer Valentine

Isn’t laughter closer to love than tears
The way it lightens and unlocks
What the tears have achieved
 
Closer to our immediate condition
Of intermittent happiness
War attenuated by peace
 
Sometimes I fear there’s more
Inside than appears outside us
But how could that possibly be
 
Or love wouldn’t be this suffering joy
We feel all around us
And struggle to absorb
 
Nor the world have to be
Quite so terrible
For solace to be born

Open Valentine

The rain is really open for business today
And means to sell off a coast or two
Next year a continent God willing
 
Politicizing the great plates of the world
With a superabundance of emotion
So the streams shift in their beds
 
Until it looks like rain is all the suffering
In the world so many little slights
Gathered into a relentless resignation
 
Which we children find great fun
Escaping the grownup’s distress
Paddling about in the streets
 
Drawn by our amphibian roots
To play with tragedy
In our rubber boots

Imperfect Valentine

I don’t know why that dead branch
In the pomegranate tree is beginning
To worry me a lot lately
 
I mean I’d have to get a ladder
And right now I can’t be bothered
And anyway is raining
 
I’d rather sit outside here under cover
And examine my nagging need
For perfection against this creed
 
Of the common sense of trees
That keeps their dead branches
Safely tucked among their green
 
This year the tree is full
Of burnished globes however
Few may yet prove edible

Seaside Valentine

Isn’t writing things down
Supposed to materialize
Memory and mood
 
What becomes one more thing
To be deleted or redeemed
In some higher cloud
 
Words as moving air again
In the little hamlet of memory
Under its heavy load
 
Of what is already fog
And done waiting to be re-done
In a quiet rain
 
In a cloud coming in from the sea
Dissolving slowly
Into such clarity

Needy Valentine

I need some cold water
To pour on my veins
I need some sun to warm me
 
I need a good fuck
Or a taste-freeze
At the drive-through mountain
 
I need all of Hereford Cathedral
Or half of Beauvais
With those Maltese Falcon hor d’oeuvres
 
Served at a real coconut grove
On the Bay of Fugitives
At three in the morning
 
I need some memory of you
Not some wind-blown scrap
That brings it all back

Overheard Valentine

O just admit your mistakes
And move on
One archetype blurted to another
 
I was listening at the keyhole
Of the world again
At the early stages of its construction
 
When they were testing
Various mortar recipes
To hold the stones together
 
So they could turn the real work
Over to the circles and the triangles
And the lovely half-moon shapes
 
Assembling their castles of mistakes
Out of the native clay
In barely a day

Unseen Valentine

My angel’s running out of aviaries
Only a few leftover for fall
Sprinkled lightly flying away
 
She says she’s saving the last
Two phoenixes for the last two days
Barring some unforeseen emergency
 
She thinks I haven’t noticed
That red bird hidden
In the dying pine trees
 
Or the two sparrows
She keeps in her pocket
Who refuse to un-mate
 
Or this dead tree
She’s dragged indoors
To wait for fate

Of It All Valentine

At the periphery of it all
The shouts and laughter of another genre
But at the center a sleeping child
 
A dark child like a light
Dimmed down in a small room
In a faraway town
 
Usually the past proceeds
With a shortage of new beginnings
But in her case being light
 
An alteration occurs
At the periphery of darkness
Allowing for the inspired movements
 
Of her hands and feet
And there at the very center
The tiniest heart beat

Branches Valentine

My mornings with my angel
My afternoons with my devil friends
My evening exchanges with Jehovah
 
So much muddled thinking in the world
None more muddled than my own
But even that’s not completely true
 
I try to straighten my thoughts
Along a single branch
As if its leaves were my feelings
 
Struggling off into autumn
With a will worthy of winter
Summer in my veins
 
But I see how it all gets muddled again
The personality of a puddle
Reflecting all that remains

Morning’s Valentine

The idea behind Christ is morning
Sooner or later you become sunlight
Seeing how everything is so tender
 
Into his presence
Startled I have been
There all along
 
I mean the feeling
Of tenderness so fine
It dissolves everything
 
Into a calm sea
You can walk across
A consuming fire
 
You can stand in unsinged
And bravely sing
As you expire

Waking Valentine

Thank you for the leftover
Mexican dinner I found
Waiting in the frig
 
I’d forgotten how much
Some things meant to me
How delicious you could be
 
When I was so hungry
And pathetic in the morning
After you’d left
 
Of course I could still
Picture that old restaurant
Eating it in bed
 
My full plate of love
When love wakens
From the dead

Sensed Valentine

The constellating style of nature
Remains the ruling exemplar
Of those who feel immortal
 
A sense that lasts all morning long
Then goes on nibbling at the edges
As the day progresses into depths
 
Of some lost mythic self
Always swimming
Just below the surface
 
At midnight it emerges
Dropping the body on the bed
Little yellowed cocoon
 
So worn and torn
Flying off its wings still wet
To praise and mourn

Eternal Valentine

All women are essential
Men a little supplemental
Which is why they fear them
 
Adam would still be still-born
In heaven if Eve hadn’t torn
The bloody rib from his breast
 
She wanted to settle for the earth
Facing whatever heaven might exist
Would have to be earned no gift
 
She trusted her weakness for him
The sweet sourness of apples
Running down her chin
 
She knew how the world would end
Having absorbed him again
In the eternal feminine 

Night Time Valentine

Planted in my angel’s heart
A rosebush she’s been tending for me
I can almost see and smell
 
She says because I dug the hole
She had the perfect flower for it
Drop by drop her blood would fill
 
Long nights she’d sharpen
With singing rasp
Its thousand thorns
 
And water it with light
Carried from some distant well
Until the leaves were born
 
How could some petaled thing
Not long to bloom
May it be soon

Returning Valentine

Before the deluge
And after the deluge
One fritillary returns
 
She wonders if the eggs she laid
Before the storm survived
As if she had an endless supply
 
As if this was all I had to do
Was keep her diary of woe
And wistfulness while she
 
Plants useful living seeds
On the stems of dying leaves
As she asked me
 
I have written it down
Whatever else happens
She had a clear plan

Old (and Rainy) Valentine

All good gardeners come to grief
They wake to the summer summing up
In a few fresh asters
 
All the fall has mastered
They remember to take
Something with them into winter
 
They believe the spring will never come
Right up out of the catalogues
The disasters of their dreams
 
They keep quaint in high esteem
Preferring the old elegances
Preparing to grow the snow
 
In varied drifts of grief
Combining all their beds and fields
In a final flower show

When Summer Passes Valentine

The bird teases the cat
‘Here-kitty-kitty’
The cat prefers a lizard
 
How they loved to burn
Several naked in my courtyard
Sunning on ancient stone
 
Some come indoors with the ants
When the rain and cold resume
Drawn by the warmth
 
Almost they want to come into our beds
And consume us I think
When we’re sleeping at night
 
Almost they want to rewrite the fairytale
Of the world with a real bite
Of the morning light