Dove’s Valentine

Two ring-necked doves
Raphael and Gabriel
Appeared and disappeared
 
In the tense time before mating
Following one another around
Watchful companions
 
They climb the naked tree and wait
To see if the ground is safe
For a visitation of the spirit
 
The gentleness they carry
In their pointed beaks
The plumpness of peace
 
Come down from the Godhead
As in the old paintings
To find some Mary or some seed

In Honor Of Valentine

From my father I learned
How to season my rice
From my mother how to sew
 
A button back on
Which I never found the time
To actually practice
 
The unsewn buttons of a life-time
I’ve saved in a jar
From shirts I’ve thrown away
 
Pants I no longer fit in
Overcoats I no longer need
But the beautiful buttons
 
That held it all together
Have a life of their own
I think as I eat my rice

So Valentine

Courage is the greatest compliment
Patience can pay to an old man
And a boy sitting on the curb
 
Holding a begging sign
But because I had no money
I went out the other exit
 
So they wouldn’t see me
Promising myself I’d go lack later
With some cash or food
 
I thought the problem isn’t
That some people are poor
But that a lot of people are greedy
 
So let’s have a war on greed
With our weapons of shame
And courage and grief

Her Valentine

She had an impish face
And the easy-going grace
Of someone I’d known before
 
But when I first met her
She was laughing and skinny
And a wonderful swimmer

 

I knew this though we had
Never gone swimming together
That came later
 
It was because she had the body
Of a fish one of those
Courageous kinds that leaps upstream
 
Over rocks and rapids
To rest in dark pools
And hatch a new dream

On Rudolf’s Birthday Valentine

A shadow fell across me
It was the cat on the roof
Of the house next door
 
The wings of the dove
Need oiling she comes
Creaking to the tree
 
I bought the hummingbirds
A new feeder but they don’t
Seem to want to change
 
I found just the right stone
To hold two larger
Stones together
 
I pulled weeds
And cut my hair
And sat down to stare

Pico’s Valentine

A sane society would want
To cultivate its people
Not fasten its talents to felonies
 
The arts not armaments
And great music would spring up
A mood of jocular seriousness
 
Each life would take on a sheen
As when gold is discovered
And we would rush to protect it
 
Then maybe the spirit of the age
Whose combat is his gaze
Merciful but stern
 
Would turn to teach us
What we never
Seem to learn

Random Valentine

When random kindness grows up
It wants to become respect
For all things
 
In the aftermath of the rain
The sun absolved kindness
Of all blame
 
In one of the stories we’re admonished
Not to come to the wedding
In shabby clothes
 
It started out with the stray cat
Eating my cat’s leftovers
Now it’s the other way around
 
When the sun broke out in the rain
It was like the shout
Of a great heart

However Valentine

However we arrive on earth
And there are so many scenarios
We take up space
 
Physical space and mental space
Like the space music takes
Hewing so closely to time
 
We manage to leave it behind
For a few ethereal moments
Dancing out of our minds
 
But how much space
Does remembered music take
That note always sounding in the ground
 
And that other note
Coming down to meet it
From the stars

Preoccupied with Laughter Valentine

It’s a cold wet morning
When the cat won’t come to me
How your laugh has sustained me
 
She finds within herself the courage
For a deeper warmth and curls
Around memories of your
 
Full-throated performance
Of happiness leaping into the air
On a cold wet morning
 
As she goes flying off your lap
And you subside into
Gales of musical chuckles
 
What could make you laugh
Was a preoccupation of mine
But I loved however it happened

Attentive Valentine

My inspiration was to wait
For intuition to come along
An attentive watching as things unfold
 
Would yield some sudden insight
That would change the way I thought
The conversations I would have
 
How can I think my thoughts
Are mine when clearly
They come out of nowhere
 
Out of a world of thoughts
Already thought
I struggle to get past
 
Yet thinking’s all I’ve got
And the will that drives it
Into a deeper feeling for the world

Theological Valentine

Each of us must be as powerful
As God after all
He’s given himself into our hands
 
Whatever we may think
Of him he has become
Enduring the finest torture
 
Our minds can endure
An unimaginable life
Of light and love
 
The infinitely distant one
Who if he lives
Must be the center of our minds
 
Who if he perishes
The thought of him
Just rises in our bones

Ancestral Valentine

How to get past our antipathies
And sympathies to someone
Who cares for everything
 
Seems the message of our ancestors
Don’t the old and the young
Still want to be cared for
 
And the sick and afraid
Which we all are
Still want to be heard
 
They knew what to value
But it somehow got lost
In endless wars
 
And all along they knew
We would never get anywhere
Until we get out of our way

Ugly Valentine

The process of becoming a swan
Was not a simple one for the duckling
She could have chosen
 
The easy path of beauty
And gotten lost
In some indignity
 
Was that what beauty cost
When it only goes skin-deep
But ugly all the way to bone
 
Often drifting alone
A swan has time to meditate
On questions such as these
 
The swan floats on
The dark waters of the past
It does what it please

His Story Valentine

If you see all of history
As just one human being
Broken into his trillion parts
 
But the life of just one
Human being whose body
Has unraveled the sun
 
And set the earth up
On his shoulders
Like Atlas did
 
Even before learning to write
Who am I
As a question
 
Just one human being
Taking all the time in the world
To become himself

Even Now Valentine

We forget color is a shadow
Of the light that we live
In a world of shades
 
Not what we appear to be
While color is so moral
I was going to say immortal
 
Each color is a whole planet
Of moods and permutations
So when we see them all together
 
In a rainbow in the order
Of their fall
From the so-called heavens
 
Even now at long last sir
Are you to have no sense
Of reverence

Sky Valentine

I want a will that watches clouds
And a head that sympathizes with them
They’re going somewhere right I think
 
But then they change their minds
Turn on a dime
About the purposes of grandeur
 
Melting down to one white nimbus
In the greater grandeur of the sky
The greater I
 
Just standing there I think
I’m like a guardian of the sky
In my old yard
 
Retired to thunder and scraps of blue
And calling out
For their blessing

Valentine's Valentine

Sooner or later the first thing
I learned was to draw
A perfectly straight line
 
When the circle was still
Beyond the scope
of my coordination
 
The simple line of time
Working through visible space
And sometimes looping back
 
I was so proud
Of my straight lines
Turning them into calendars
 
And ladders and stick creatures
Until you took my hand
And drew a star

Because Valentine

Because we are all teachers of one another
We are also students of one another
And how I have studied you
 
How I have watched you sweat
Trying to impress me
To pass over from letters into a reading
 
Of one another what can be
Trusted about the story
We are writing together
 
The curriculum of love
With so much homework
Confusing it with sex
 
I grew so tired of learning things
And you had nothing left to teach
How lovely to lie together on this beach

Nothing Valentine

Even nothing is something
To be considered
To be imagined
 
The nothing that is a grown tree
The imagination of movement
Being sketched in charcoal
 
Nothing is
But it is overcome
By something
 
Must be surrender
Is embedded
In everything
 
How nothing succumbs
To becoming something
Encompassed by all that is

Dancing Valentine

With many retreatings
And advancings and much flailing about
The dance is progressing
 
In the empty starry ballrooms
And the crowded streets
Where the new moves are practiced
 
And the music is louder and faster
And has still not driven out
Our demons or our angels
 
It keeps trying in bars
And small choirs in churches
To sway and to clap
 
To the words of the dance
Where the young still gather
And the old still chant

Mantric Valentine

The animals are crying out
We need a human hand to free us
That we may overcome our dreaming
 
Receive the hand of blessing
That you may return to your homes
In human hearts
 
The plants are beginning to feel
We need the deepest grief
To finally resurrect us
 
Receive an ever-ripening spring
That you may sing
Your hearts out
 
The minerals look willing
We need the light of the flowers
To bring us back to shining
 
Receive the light of the darkness
That you may speak the world
All in one word

Forgetful Valentine

These days I find
When I forget something
And have to go back
 
To the room where I left it
A word or a pencil or a person
I stop at the doorway and
 
Look in to see if it’s still there
I don’t have to go all the way back
Into the room to find it
 
So maybe I’m making progress
In unremembering what
I keep coming back for
 
To live at the behest of the future
Of what so urgently
Wants to be remembered

Revised Valentine

I still sometimes confuse them
Luther and Lucifer
As a recovering Catholic
 
The revised myths of childhood
Which still hold a certain truth
But let me let go
 
Of the great beast of the past
And take hold of what
Is left of the Christ
 
Whatever in childhood
I knew as Christ
The shepherd king
 
I imagined would have come
And saved me by now
One of his darkest sheep

Historical Valentine

The dates are crucial
Because then we can watch
The overall arrangement of things
 
The movement of great souls in and out
As if each period acted a play
Within a play to catch
 
The conscience of the time
And bring it forward on a plate
Don’t sum me up we say
 
Don’t fence me in
But what can it mean the Inquisition
Grew up beside the great cathedrals
 
With their miraculous windows
Or that Raphael was painting Madonnas
While Luther was taking his vows

As Valentine

As you are still
As I once was
In the days when everyone
 
Wanted to be holy
Or a heretic
Burned at the stake
 
Or a quiet lunatic
In a monastery cell
Slaving over manuscripts
 
When you were medieval
And I was just beginning
To think for myself

As I am still

As you once were
Burning at the stake

Historical Valentine

If history includes a future
I might begin to understand it
Not as words or pictures
 
But as a being that has a life
Of its own making
Or it couldn’t exist at all

Remembering is something

Even a stone achieves
In the process of dissolving
 
But to think right into
The being of history and see
It was always to be continued
 
Isn’t that what history had in mind
In coming into being
In deciding to be at all

His Body’s Valentine

‘Get up you lazybones
And ride the wind-horse’
I heard someone say as I woke
 
Go out looking for your father
Comb the woods for his body
Frozen under a bush
 
In the fetal position
Or propped against a tree
As if waiting for you
 
What are you talking about I said
My father’s long dead
And we were not friends
 
No wait you don’t understand
The trembling voice replied
He is what you are inside

For the Tenth Grade Valentine

The son is not like the father
That’s the considerable point
Though something passes between them
 
If we returned to the Middle Ages
We would hardly be able to endure
A conversation with our local parents
 
About our different costumes
That so aesthetically
Mirror the soul’s
 
Continuing need for affection
And yet they were consumed
With thoughts about the Holy Trinity
 
Their high drama built up
Solidly around a spiritual world
We can only envy and deride
 
Which goes before us like a father
Who has lost his only son
Living somewhere in this world

Wanting Valentine

Why are so many extraordinary people
Glowing in the rain today
Waiting for a bus
 
They are so beautiful
It makes me blush
Slipping past in the limousine
 
Of my colorful imagination
Rain makes me a little dizzy
With its galleries of paintings
 
And nowhere to sit down
But driven to walk the streets
Or trudge off into the woods
 
What more can the rain want
With its mood of resignation
Then to bring us back to life

Returning Valentine

I tried to prepare the landscape
For the coming downpour of rain
A lot would depend on the wind
 
It was what we prayed to watch
The migration of storms returning
From their long voyage over the sea
 
Sweeping in over the beach towns
And the dried-up desert towns
Dying out behind the mountains
 
All the plants stood at attention
Pretending to listen to me
Counseling flexibility
 
But when the water drops drop
Lift them carefully to your lips
The first vintage is the best

Quarrelsome Valentine

A quarrel is a poor one
If it never gets resolved
It goes around secretly weeping
 
It pampers itself with justifications
And long windy speeches
To cover its guilt and grief
 
There’s the easy love that flows
From attraction but the love
That comes from a quarrel
 
Is stronger and knows
The power of forgiveness
Is the only proof of love
 
Therefore forgive me love
If I didn’t love enough
To end our quarrel

How Only Love Evolves Valentine

Only out of a straight line
And a broken line they said
Was everything made
 
But who drew the line straight
And who came back to break it
The races of men devolved
 
From the moods of more complicated species
Who range above us in ranks they said
That can still be perceived
 
Hierarchies to be feared and obeyed
Whose straight and broken lines
Showed us how they did it
 
How they descended into words
How they quarreled among themselves they said
To bring love into the world

Enough Valentine

In the hermitage of my ego
In the pinnacle of my pride
In the blow of my overthrow
 
In the polar vortex of my heart
In the coup of my embrace
In the wanting to be held
 
In the snow-covered woods
Where the icy river rushes
As if to get away from me
 
As if meeting a friend now enemy
On the bridge above the torrent
Now one of us must go
 
In the iron-work of the railing
In the standing above the world
In the softness of the snow

Falling Valentine

Last night falling asleep
I went back to when the moon
Was still inside the earth
 
When the earth was still
A crystallizing sea
Raving with possibility
 
And then with a leap
I went back to the sun
When it was the only one
 
Pregnant with the planets
And lonely in the darkness
Her lover once the deep
 
I went all the way back
To the nothing beginning
But I found only sleep