A Life's Valentine

Prego I say
Prego prego
Si prego
Prego prego prego
Gracie prego prego
Non prego
I said no
Prego prego
Prego Gracie
Prego
Prego

#5 (In the Cafe)

Dear friend the wind remembers
What the snow forgets
Now you live in the future
Like a Russian doll
Receding into a sliver
Of your former self
Death parents time
To grow up to be
Something that happens
Day to day over there
All I have to do is listen
To your new language
The gift of your advice on how
To go on living here and now

#4

In the garden of your flower
In a field overlooking many hills
And valleys lapping like waves
Free of innocence and guilt
Able to see things objectively
Adding to your earlier studies
Of shore birds and rock formations
The evidence of angels
Metamorphosing into substance
Thoughts accumulating into movement
There among the leaning trees
Where a deer or a pelican appears
Overjoyed to find your beloved
Animals in heaven's breeze

#3

And though a lot of the addresses in heaven
Are clearly marked others have faded
To gray hieroglyphs
But I know that I will find you
Walking toward down some street
Like what kept you I've been waiting
Hours took the wrong plane
Wound up in the spiritual equivalent
Of a seaside town an old man
Talked me into renting this condo
Like we always planned
When we won the lotto
Just joking Lord but it's true
You prepared a place for me

#2

Preparing your own return
In a new room along the shore
Of infinity still acclimating
To breathing light and being
On the inside of everything
Trees and birds as they fly
In and out of materiality
And where inside I feel
Your essence now the forming
Of who you really are
Preparing the particular
Circumstances of our
Inevitable reunion

In the Neighborhood of the So-Called Dead Valentine #1

Surrounded by your pictures of pelicans
Your reindeer and turtles and shells
Your old books that describe
Their individual virtues and lifestyles
Beside the stories of the extinct
Who are plotting their return
How they will re-emerge
From the photos you've collected
Flying back into the bright air
As if nothing has changed
You knew how the earth
Preserves itself through crossing
Out and adding on
Growing more ephemeral and lovely
As you are now it seems

Lukewarm Valentine

Cooler nights and lukewarm days
Where does that breeze come from
An alteration of Middle English 'lew'
("tepid") hot equal to cold
Decidedly undecided days
Followed by nights that make up
Their minds melting into mornings
That feel like a kind of yearning again
This could go on forever
As far as I'm concerned
This having it both ways
I mean the sun sits down
Right beside a raining cloud
And the stars are frozen in place
What more could I want

Equinoctial Valentine

When I was nine and walking home once
Through the alley short-cuts from school
I was such a dreamer then
Still learning what autumn meant
When suddenly a black dog leapt
Toward me barking loudly
And though he was stuck behind a fence
My fear made me so furious at him
I ran right back at him barking loudly
Until his teeth thrust through a hole
In the wire and I went home bloody
Which explains this little scar
I keep on the left of my lip
Which I haven't thought about for years
Though it become a motif of my life
This leaping into the jaws of fate

Please Valentine

Please finish your sentence
Say what you were going to say
It's not so much I want to hear it
As that you'll be finding the words
As you go along some truth
Will come into them if
It's really what you want to say
Even if at first you resist it
Who wants to stand naked
Before the uncertainty of love
So keep your clothes on
And just keep talking
Till you come to it all
Regardless of who hears it
The self you want to say

Invisible Valentine

On hope's lame wings I fly
And smash against the glass
And slide along the light
And hit the floor
And lie there shocked
By what I did not see before
I was not free at all
I saw when I awoke
The cage was larger than I thought
I thrashed about and wept
And scuttled to a dark corner
Where eagerly I slept
Aching to recover
My lame wings of hope
For I have no other

Public Comment Valentine

For a relatively shy person
You'd think I'd know how
To shut up and sit down
But here I am again
Accepting the challenge
Of saying something that reaches
You in under two minutes
So I've written this down for me
To read because otherwise
I'd just ramble on and on
Mumbling for something to say
About the weather around you
How you carry the clouds over the sea
And the stars as if they were nothing
And I would lose my chance completely

Unknown Valentine

In the dark years when the great
Gothic churches arose like clipper ships
On the horizons of Europe
We still don't know how they did it
While in China their greatest woman poet
And her lover Ming were married
Themselves a couple on a porcelain cup
Because of the arbitrariness of time
Setting out on garlanded river boats
To gather their vast collections
Of artifacts and laborious rubbings
Of inscriptions on 4th c. BCE urns
As we say now until they filled
Ten huge storage rooms in Ch'ing Chou
Later sadly lost in fires but somehow
It makes me happy imagining them
The sheer industry and love
Like the burning of those cathedrals
Which were steadily rebuilt
Or the indigo staining the rose windows
We still don't know how they did it

Craving Valentine

I found a rock shaped like a heart
Out of which a bite had been taken
So I started to collect them
On the beaches and trails I walked
But finding too many to carry
home now I just rub them
With a little saliva or sea water
To illuminate their silence
And put them back in their
Carefully arrived-at niches
They told me how any rock
Can get broken in all the right places
Until a heart-shape emerges
Ready to be smoothed as skin
Polished till it glows so ripe
It craves to be bitten into

Ruined Valentine

In the ruins impatience leaves behind
I admit I like to wander in my mind
Old factories or monastery grounds
The outlines of abandoned cities
Where we used to live and thrive
Of course I can go to any modern town
To see what that looked like then
Anywhere we live today
But in the old places where
No one lives now I can feel
How different we were then
And how hard it is to go on
After such devastation
A world built up as eagerly torn down
I can see where this is leading soon

At Times Valentine

What's going on is the sun
Which has reached that point
On the roof where it starts
To fall right into my eyes
I was just thinking of you
How the sun reminds me
Of something about your presence
Which is not blinding but tender
I imagine the sun in a human body
And if I sit here in this chair
It will slowly enclose me
As at times you do warmly
Your hand on my heart

Surviving Valentine

Those who go on surviving somehow
In the Witness Protection Program of the heart
Who have left their countries and families behind
Cast out from the common time
As if they were dead to them thus
Forced to betray themselves
Those who chose to tell the truth
About love its secret workings
Where the real history is written
Under an alias in code
It was always an argument
About admiring either the animal
Or the angel who is stalking them
Those who choose loneliness
And those to whom it is given

Even Valentine

Even the Christ stormed through
The money-changers and the merchants
Scattering even the lambs and doves
But he did it only once
To enact a parable for them
It wasn't even about the money
But some awe for the Holy
Of Holies his Father within
That he lived also
Implicit in the hearts
And lungs of them
For this he died and cried out
To his Father to forgive
these louts his crime

Nameless Valentine

Among the new names for children today
There's Ruff pronounced like a dog's bark
And Traction if you have a girl
All the things we've named ourselves
And how many names have we had
Eking out our former lives
As if in search of our original
Secret sacred name
For which the others are stand-ins
Hallowed be our names
Especially the ones we didn't like
Don't call me that
My name is fill-in-the-blank
It all depends on the mood of the vowels
As they are surrounded by the consonants
We unconsciously pay attention to
Maybe at a certain stage of growth
We abandon the name our parents
Gave us and just say Self

World Without End Valentine

Soft as the invisible and
Hard as the world can be
We still wake up each day
A little dimmer a little wiser
Strange how the world
Seems to go on without us
Even though each of us
Stands at the center of it
Our very insignificance
Of immense importance
I try to stay alert
But casual carrying the world
But sometimes I just have to
Break down and weep for us all

Not the Flute but the Music Valentine

Beautiful Tamino and handsome Pamina
Are introduced at a party one night
To the Queen of the Night
A wealthy New York socialite
The Queen is taken with him
And he with her you can
See it on Pamina's face
The Queen and T. begin
A tumultuous romance
A series of trials by fire
While Pamina languishes in grief
Until late one night T. puts it together
The Queen and Papageno
Are being sung by the same man
An amazing baritone castrato
But regardless it's the music
That saves them all in the end

Know Thyself Valentine

If the body is a shadow
Which it most certainly is
What is the light that casts it
Which must certainly be there
And where is it coming from
Though one day a year
There is no shadow
And the whole body fills with light
Often barely noticed
The light itself the shadow
Of the moving air
Driven by some fire
Who is it there forgotten
The weaving wind his token

Abu's Valentine

My cat sleeps between my bare feet
While I write you this letter
I feel so close to your time in a way
But she wants to sleep so I let her
To make the old master laugh
And the reprobate fake it better
To have taken so much pleasure
Slowly untying its fetters
Always in search of the true
Picture of your betters
In a land that murdered its singers
But preserved all the old books
When I bend down to pet her
I bow to you Abu as well
Lest the ages ever forget her

Ghazal Valentine for Abu Huwas

A brief ghazal about our eternity
Would have to begin with immaturity
To set the stage for a fantasy
Where we keep locking people up
The burden of time's objectivity
Gets heavier to lift
And there's the recurring difficulty
Of feeling something about everyone
You meet a shred of divinity
Or a sense of humor
Struggling to be free
But we get locked out
Of one another and the key to continuity
Long lost no wonder I cling
To every word you speak of our fragility

Ii Valentine

People who are too quiet
Tend to be hiding something
People who talk too much
Tend to be hiding something worse
I found this out in the district
Of Ii in Finland where I supposed
All the I's actually settled
In the ice ages of materialism
And are still living with the land
And where now every summer
I's surge in from every continent
For their annual coming-home
Slowly destroying the city of Ii
With their heresies and pleasures
The original Ii wasn't like this at all
It was a small place near the sea
Where you could still remember yourself

Into the Deluge Valentine

Now ecology becomes theology
Where it started out
Before electricity duct-tied us
To the earth but this world
Has just one life to live
To achieve its revelation
Before the lights go out
Always just one more life to live
Clinging to sand
Before the one who came to visit
And stayed and ate us
Out of house and home
With his talk of another crusade
Returns for our blood
Let us find a human future

Purely Conceptual Valentine

Evil isn't any smarter than the rest
But it may be a lot more industrious
And true goodness can be so naïve
Until it's taught to grieve
And think for itself about itself
And not be surprised by it
Having taken up residence inside
Evil is such a personal thing
One must take it as a brother
Always trying to take over
Coming home drunk with power
Trying to tear the house down
But goodness loves it so
Even when beaten up again

Traveling Valentine

A hard-won gift each day is
Fought for by the struggling ranks
Of births and deaths
Always flowing in and out
I wonder if there's an old station
Or a platform a little above
The earth where they can meet
And confer exchanging words
For silence bodies for souls
Waiting for their late trains
To finally arrive and take them
To their final destinations
Or is it like two trains
Rushing past one another
Trying to touch a face in the swell
That moment when eyes catch
Waving farewell

White Sail Valentine

Between Saturn and the Sun
Between a white sail and the amethyst sea
Finally indigo wins out
All the wine is drunk
The little fires that were set along the shore
To guide us back gone out
Lost in the reverence
Of this midnight blue
Set down upon a billion stars
That yet bleed through
Tough lumps of light
As if we were ever left alone
Or for long unattended
Lost at sea at night