Our Valentine

Stand up my soul I say
Every morning my waking prayer
I walk to speak
 
Come to me you lights
And animate my dare
To live another day
 
Fill me with your doubleness
My heart in unison
As my mind on earth
 
Give me your thoughts
Worth driving further
And forget not to put
 
Out the sign that says
I will return
By dawn

Not Valentine

After the sibilant yes of the day
The droning no of the night
The world can’t make up its mind
 
I love me I love me not
I love you I love you not
The truth circles them both
 
And working against our own nature
We aspire to a life of our own
As if the unreality of it all
 
Was just something to be endured
Like rain on a long walk
We insisted on taking
 
Just to be free to walk
Toward love or not
Or love is not

Strangest Valentine

My favorite caller again
‘Name Unavailable’
But I was peering at its pistil
 
Green and reminiscent
Of a broken praying mantis
Stuck in the middle of a pinwheel
 
The strangest flower in the world
My climbing passion-
Vine the animality of it
 
A lust so pure it proves
There is another life
Of five green sepals
 
And five pink petals
Though when you stand back
The overall effect is lavender and purple

Still Time Valentine

I found a grub in the house
Who was more startled
When I picked it up
 
Velvety soft and placed it
On a paper napkin
Curled like a fetus
 
Out we went to find
Where it could possibly have come from
Which twig it might hang from yet
 
If there was still time
To weave around itself
Some transforming night
 
A leaf or a cloud
O take me with you
Pale filaments of flight

Visitation Valentine

I snap back quickly
Like a watered plant
When you arrive
 
I thrive on the air
You breathe back to me
On a tossed word
 
Unfolding you
Clandestinely
The motion is so slow
 
While my leaves plump up wildly
Like conifers quiet in the fog
After a morning storm
 
There in the forest of you
Where I suddenly
Find my way

Nearby Valentine

The six-long-legged creature
Walked right into the lake
Of the puddle and stood in the middle
 
Of it drinking in I suppose or caressing
His image in the water
After his ablutions
 
Every hair in place
As he puts off shaving
For another day
 
The long beard of his shadow
Tethered to the shore
So still he remembers my feeling
 
Of floating alone in the sea
At three in the afternoon
An empty beach nearby

Highway 74 Valentine (for Dee)

I guess you’ll know when you get there
But it won’t look anything like
The place you just left behind
 
A hair-raising roller-coaster ride
Over a browned mountain
Through woods ready for fire
 
Near the summit I saw a beggar
With the fallen face of an angel
Whose sign said Give it up/for love 
 
I wanted to stop and chat
But the snarling dog he barely restrained
Entirely changed my mind
 
Down I sped to a pearly lake
Pale little houses sprinkled round
So foggy and pretty it all looked fake

True Valentine

I spy with my little I
My true I who never comes down
To this troubled earth
 
But glimmering and shy
Watches and waits
In the midnight sky
 
Like a whispering star
In the vast of space
So near and yet so far
 
And even when I cannot see its light
I feel its presence pull me
Closer and close to itself
 
Out of the darkest night
O I who would I be
Except you glow in me

So Far Valentine

The soul acting on its own
Can only get so far
Pursuing the larger questions
 
Even examining its own body
How easily it gets stumped
Trying to follow the blood in the veins
 
Back to its original idea
As a bolt of lightening
Held and moving in the flesh
 
Charging the soul with a light
That’s clearly other-worldly
Over and over with every breath
 
Until the soul reels and dances
Sensing something in its sorrow
And joy that cannot be grasped

Sojourning Valentine

Because you lived long in the other world
When the time came to settle in again
After many years of shopping around
 
Trying on the current eye and skin shades
Just to have a sense of what was going on
In the different possible locales
 
The big commitments had already been made
All the preparatory arrangements done
Leaving you a little time to look around
 
You could see how much had changed
Not much you couldn’t feel
Some clear compassion for
 
And now you’re leaving again so soon
For another long sabbatical
Your backpack full of love and questions

Walked Valentine

If I don’t speak to them
They won’t speak to me
The ladies of the morning
 
And the dark children who run
Around my yard before dawn
From whom I hide my dreams
 
Will return to being leaves
When the ladies walk their dogs
Around the pond so perky
 
Even the sun pulls on its leash
That leads me finally to greet
These ladies of the light
 
Who pass from each to each
Across the pond bright speech
Out of the murky night

Remembering Sophia Valentine

When we all stood so still
Because we were trees
Children planted in a circle
 
Little Jesus was sitting on his knees
And little Buddha and little Allah
The three boys from next door
 
With their baby sister Sophia
Who was so fat she rolled
Around the floor to the boys’ guffaws
 
Years later at the high school reunion
They all dragged back their everafters
And wept together like sad failures
 
Until Sophia showed up to all smiles
Still sporting that shining diadem
Her father had given her as a girl

Dead Valentine

You brought me an old paperweight
With a glass rose enclosed
Coiled round by a sleeping serpent
 
You said start from here
And carefully remove the rose
Without smashing the glass
 
Or waking the snake
Draw it out by degrees
Only using your eyes
 
Letting the roots of the rose
Slowly devour the tightening
Body and blood of the snake
 
As it rises up through the glass
Weightless and red
A gift to the dead

Ballast Valentine

Nightly blessed with the knowledge
Of you and the daily conviction
Of your presence somehow
 
Still I’m not sure what to do
When I get up every morning
And find you gone somehow
 
Back to the prison of your heaven
Where I can only visit you
And sometimes I’m refused
 
Permission at the entrance
And sit here in the sun
You’ve left behind
 
As a mere token of your love
With its little ballast of light
Against all gloom

Daisy’s Valentine

Crazy Daisy is a sweet dog
Of a girl I would see I said
You so remind me of someone
 
Who lived on our street
When I was a dog in Toronto
Homeless on Sunnyside Beach
 
Actually I had run away
Overwhelmed by the confusion
Of the dog they wanted me to be
 
When really I loved only beaches
And luckily there was one nearby
Even if I was only three
 
But tall for my age I crossed
Several busy streets to get there
Unobserved and happy as a dog

Animal Life Valentine

I let my kitty train me
To come when called
And explain this mistake
 
She says I’ve made a mess of it
But what else is new
She’d rather chew her biscuit
 
Little hard animal shapes
She bites and snaps
While I devour my cereal
 
The music of the morning
Which we often eat outdoors
Awaiting that marauding neighbor’s cat
 
Who comes to steal the leftovers
While the drama of another day
Spreads out in the sun before us

Perennial Valentine

In the old plant nursery at Baseline
Where the newborns are all balled up
In their little plastic cribs
 
Bawling their beauty away
I mean the magenta petunias
Are completely out of control
 
While the camellias go on snoring
I don’t think they ever really
Wake up to their potential
 
But way in the back you encounter
All the ones that didn’t sell
Like good ideas no one wanted
 
Like last year there was a run
On roses while the magenta
Petunias went right on by

Breathing Valentine

In the democracy of the heart
Matter is all that keeps us apart
But in a good way that insists
 
On each one being itself somehow
The thing you are becoming
In the evolution of the heart
 
Which moves down into the matter
Of the body hurrying ahead
Of the still-forming brain
 
In the physiology of the heart
Where the divisions occur
The recapitulation of a flower

Arrangement and the gasp
That sets it breathing
In the heaven of the heart

False Valentine

There’s a false distinction
Between the world and me
I’ve noticed time breaks down
 
But the spun construction
Of my life keeps weaving it back up again
Clever as a spider web
 
One day goes into another like a fly
And the nights of course fly by
One wakes from one’s cocoon
 
Into the knowledge of being caught
Bundled for being eaten later
By ravenous time
 
But with one thin thread the spider
Hurls toward the sun
All the distinctions come undone

Clicking Valentine

In the dictionary of your difficult days
Which you can always add to
On the computer or delete
 
Which you are teaching me though
I have always wanted to be the subject
Not the object of your ways
 
Of clicking on something
And making it appear
So simple as you did me
 
So we could complete our programs
And know how to open or close
Which for me as a gardener
 
I analogize to leaves
And all the things that were
Flashing around us

Your Valentine

I wake to the sound of you peeing
So my dream includes a fountain by a church
When I fall back into it
 
By which point you are gone
Into the other worlds you occupy
I think often very bravely
 
I think we can only imagine one another
Here in this tunnel of mirrors
The real seeing comes later
 
But I get up anyway
Confident of something
Though I’m not sure what
 
I write this on the day I’m sowing
The winter grass so you would
Remember me when it leaps

Stopping Valentine

When I remember to stop
Con permisso inside you
And see the hundred views
 
Of your vast cities and country-sides
Or without your permission I spot you
When you are most yourself
 
Sitting on the beach at twilight
Preparing to be a fish again
Or another morning sky
 
A blush of a tremble
And then the magnificent
Trumpets of light
 
Which sweep across your face
Now mine when I remember
Com permisso to stop inside you

New Moon Valentine

It’s a Manichean morning
In the time before color
Seeps into the world
 
When the white gold of the moon
From its little saucer
Pours eternity down
 
On the trembling infant
Of the world such a shy seed
The only one of its kind
 
Sometimes it wakes me up
And I go out to see it rising
Pouring and rising
 
And even if I’ve let things go too far already
I still intend to pull them back
I still want to see them through

Situation Meditation Valentine

Little Lucifer was right about the light
Though it didn’t belong to him
He knew he had to have it
 
But he moved too quickly
To look behind it
And see that little old man
 
Sitting in the darkness
His stern companion
With his starry mind
 
These two great rulers
Of youth and old age
He grew a little dizzy with himself
 
Struggling to stay behind
Biding his moment to shine
More light on light

Oracular Valentine

At the oracle of my angel
At the shrine where she was last seen
Though we talk everyday
 
In a corner of the garden
That mental garden
Where she revealed herself to be
 
A woman of valor
She would say to me
Don’t make me look bad
 
In your shining hour
I stood in the crowd
And hollered for you
 
Make me proud
Carry me in you
As yourself

All Saints Day Valentine

Us just standing there
At the beginning of the world
All of us in our different costumes
 
Is a painting I often conjure
When I want to laugh or cry
How the different archetypes
 
Assemble us like children
We are happy to be again
And we all start singing
 
The first morning song
When we greet one another
And the archetypes shake our hands
 
Who are they still singing
These strange parents
Who love us so much