Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Dee’s Valentine

You tree complete me
And you hibiscus affirm
My existence the way
Color confirms and perfumes
This crucified day makes plain
What is light is confusing
I feel your pain I’m standing
In the sunshine of it
My feet are catching fire
My heart is starting to glow
I could be mistaken for spring
Or carried out a corpse
I could be the horse you’re riding
On the beach at Sol y Mar
O my soul

Monday, April 29, 2019

Something New Valentine

A tri-tone of Fritillaries
Running up and down the scale
A soundless visible music in orange
Flutterings with a vine thrown in
There’s almost something Mozartian
In their allegros and andantes
How they can expand on a simple
Series of intervals indenting
The air pursuing one another
Like listening to a spiritual music
In a mathematical world
Always adding and subtracting
But here multiplying and dividing
Here the wings reach planets
And the green vine trembles
And something new is created

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Singer’s Valentine

If all chairs are musical
And all tables are laid
Let me lie on your table
Body and blood
Let me be violin-capable
In your Sunday morning band
Or the one who stands
In awe in the back pew
At your beautiful voice
Its body and blood
Lifting above the table
Singing a new song
You just wrote down
Dictated by angels
Offered to clowns

Saturn in the Morning Sky

A close distance one god
Must keep from another
But the sky is no metaphor
For the revelation of the body
As a flower or a tower tumbled
Into a withering ruin
Some desire for destruction burns
Through the cathedral of the brain
The decision a god must die
Written into the still-standing stones
And that god is you and you and me
Saturn’s outrageous children
Compelled by our body’s
Insistence on taking the risk
Of leaping across the abyss of what
All along was filling it with thought

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Mercury Close to Venus in the Morning Valentine

Among the treasures found at Troy
A tear catcher such as David says
The Lord uses to save our tears
So the dead not be mourned
A little glass bottle where the tears
Were stored and left with the dead
To prove the love for their greatness
Transformed into the residue
Of a perfume later analysis shows
It will all be alright in the end
The rain of tears will evaporate
By morning so the ground
Gives off the sweet scent of dying
Flowers mixed with mercurial light
To keep Venus from crying

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Mars in the Bull’s Eye Valentine

That young man who fled naked
Into the night leaving his clothes
In their grasping hands
Must have been a great runner
Crying and choking through
The newly-seeded fields the miles
Back to his mother’s house
Where she was waiting sleepless
Already knowing the words
He couldn’t speak when he arrived
Silently they let his sisters sleep
What preparations could they make
Realizing it was all over now
Already the rooster was crowing
As he burst into tears again

Monday, April 15, 2019

Waxing Moon Day Valentine

Sometimes I stand back amazed
At myself to let you get
Behind my eyes and find
Your fondness looking back
The body is such a hall of mirrors
As hell must be finding only oneself
Repeated and repeated but you
Have smashed all the images
Just to watch in the smashing how
Into fragments and petals
The body unravels
Or else why come all the way
Into a body yours or mine
If not to make it a purer thing

Wholly Valentine

Wholly holy wholly hole
Has become my mantra
Has become my call
I sing it to school buses going by
And throw it up over the green mountain
We call south and they call north
Which today because it’s
Promiscuous spring anointing
Our feet with refuse and flowers
Because today you died
And were finally able
To get a good night’s sleep
Wholly leaving a gaping hole
Gone from here to everywhere
Walking some dusty road
Wholly holy wholly hole

Saturday, April 13, 2019

Actual Valentine

We are having such an in-standing life
Now that we’ve reached the periphery
Of the woods the only question being
If when we enter we will find
The ravenous wolf again
To be stared down or not
Or if stumbling into that clearing
Where we still sit speechless
Waiting for ourselves to catch up
Strangely there are the same elves
And sylphs as in the first stories
Waiting to carry us away
Or maybe not so strangely given
The facts remain the same
Happily ever after the end

Friday, April 12, 2019

Wanted Valentine

Do you want the world
As much as the world wants you
Or is it like in love one needs
To love a little more
When one doesn’t want to
The perversity of love
The suffering restores
When love loves last itself
Is almost universal
One wants to get it down
To a few cogent essentials
On a single page
But the world is a manic lover
Who won’t let you dance alone
Throwing your arms around
As if in ecstasy or rage

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Just Logical Valentine

When it embraces all the light it can
The final black super-hole of the cosmos
Will implode back into God
If you think of the flowering now
The mille-fleur of galaxies we see
It will be the last seed saved
The seed that lies years
In the spring ground so ready
To be remembered again
Even now in our brief bodies
The still black hole of the soul
Swallows the everyday sun
And a whole new army of stars
Will have to be needed
To pull us stem-like
Up out of the ground

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Secret Valentine

Can you think of a dishonest sky
Or a single untruthful tree
Or a road that doesn’t lie
All day I spied
On two anxious sparrows
Species unknown
Feathering their nest
Only one could enter
At a time the little hole
In the soffit so
The other had to wait
Anxiously clutching
Its bundle of treasure
In its beak it looked
A little paranoid
Dancing around
As if it held some secret
Of the world

Still Life Valentine

I started a small book
About death and you
But then I buried it under
Accumulating book-clouds
Through the whole night
Birds flying in circles
Like us struggling
In a maze of dark and light
Above the city of death
They can’t see it’s just
A little town on the outskirts
A doorway in the middle of a street
We all are walking toward look
Someone’s arranged the dead birds
In orbits the most colorful
At the center according to kind

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Natural Valentine

Hearing the snow crunch underfoot
It’s easy to feel winter’s indifference
Or to think that summer is out to get us
When it’s all a great hoax
Perpetrated by our impatience
Just scratch the surface
And you can sense the years
And years of careful preparation
Implied by its construction
Including the fortuitous
The sick and the lame
All are woven in
All are given a name

Available Valentine

Under the compulsion of days
And the trepidatious nights
I was thinking ‘rapacious’
The way they eat the lights
And through the obsessive afternoons
Even onto the twilight hush
Of all that happens in a hurry
Driving off into the darkness
Into the noise of silence
It seems like static at first
It feels like abandonment
Like a soft rain just starting
To flex its limbs
A mockingbird calling to you
From the middle of your life

Monday, April 8, 2019

Something Valentine

If something happens to our love
I’ll write it down completely
So when you come home
You can read it to me
But I’ve dropped my pen
It’s rolled under the couch
And to tell you the truth
I don’t thing I will ever reach
It all this of course
Was written down
Much later it shocked me
I remember a little
The irretrievable words
That will have to go unwritten
And I couldn’t wait
For you to get home

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Woken Valentine

If you hadn’t loved me
We might never have lived
But God loved you more
That you were always satisfied
With whatever we had planned
For you God and I
The end of finality
For we three absolutes
At last naked and afraid
There were no beds in heaven
So we stole one
Where three could lie
Your body the bed
From which we woke
As you and I and God

Saturday, April 6, 2019

Old Valentine

The little lights are burnt out
But the sun shines into a few of them
An old celebration
Her morning dose of love was enough
To carry her till the next morning
Or else she was moaning all day
So he took an axe to the day
To the very roots of the day
A vine that would only grow more days
Some ancestral tangle
That covered the trellis
In a single bound
He tore it all down
The burnt lights of the leaves
In which the sun did sparkle

Sooner Valentine

Sooner rather than later
We might have to try
The ultimate solution
We who favor the difficult
And thorny path
To practice our mettle
Might just have to
Gulp down our pride
If love is the point
The only and final solution
The unfailing bottom-line
If we would have the evolution
We deserve to undergo
That we exist at all in the end
The proof love wins

Friday, April 5, 2019

Sufficient Valentine

I will say a novena
For your ailing Hoya
If when it thrives
You’ll give me a cutting
I will trade my fond cat
For four more
Of your mornings
I will track down
Your last lover
And give him or her
A thrashing for not
Loving you sufficiently
Yes I’ll have another coffee
Yes I believe in God

Thursday, April 4, 2019

Annunciation Valentine

I called him Buster
Of the Downward Gaze
And the first time we sat down together
 
We got drunk on the sun
And sat there for a dog’s age
Staring at one another
 
Cats come from magic stories
Dogs from novels or plays
He finally announced
 
As you can see I’m one of the former
Thus the gray mourning cloak
And these yellow-green eyes
 
After me the invisible world
Begins for you – I’ve come
To carry you across

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Redacted Valentine

Skillfully scribbled-over text
I struggle to unravel
What yesterday scrawled
 
But overnight redacted
Black ink on black ink
With the word daring dangling
 
From sleep still decipherable
I see what you’re doing dream
Erasing my footsteps home
 
Sometime in the night
I must have written down the code
In a few simple sentences
 
And then scratched them out
For a few moments the secret opened
On all I couldn’t bear to behold

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Blogger in Draft Valentine

My poems are my faded prayer-flags
They turn in the wind like all I’ve got
Their bones slip away
 
It’s just this slipping
I pray to encounter
Of one prayer into another
 
My streaming one connection
With the Allmindedness
Who must be listening
 
Eagerly to each prayer
Not for its supplication
Nor hardly for its fear
 
But that here in the wind
There is still
Someone there

Monday, April 1, 2019

Pricked Valentine

A pricked finger is a budding rose
The rose of Damascus say
On the road to Damascus
 
Or she fell among nettles say
Suffering the pricks of knowledge
And lay there kicking
 
But the red blood rose
Sat on the fingertip so quietly
Eternity froze
 
As if one had seen a god on the road
For which the rose
Was a mere mnemonic
 
When all along
It was just a child
Running to her mother