All Photographs Are Lonely Valentine

Today is so still so strict

Breathing seems intrusive

The clouds concrete slabs

The trees transfixed as paint

The stop-light stopped at red

And I alone walking the empty streets

Where have you all gone

Following the crying out of town

People of the earth

To some festival or grave 

And left me in this photograph

Where calm has finally come

Where nothing moves or needs to

And nothing can be done

Spontaneous Buoyancy Valentine

Bearing in the new born

Harvest placing it on the Scales

September just wants

To pack it all in and go home

But my Orion won't let it

Something larger

Refuses all his flowers

A buoyant seriousness

As he bounces along

Completely dismembering himself

Down to this skeletal outline

A few mere stars

Where once were beads

Fly's Valentine

I see you hungry fly

Following me into the house

I see you disaster

Creeping up the coast

From the corner of my eye

I see you spirits

Of disagreement and delusion

Even at the grocery store

I thought I'd better feed the fly

It must want something

It looks very skinny and wan

For something that devours us

Little asterisk of death

You have no idea

What a surprise I have for you

Crisis of Memory Valentine (for Dave)

It's not your memory failing

It's you that's blocking it

It remembers everything

But grants you access

On its own terms only

It serves a secret

But recurring theme

With its own imperfections

Yes memory imagines you

The broken-up truth

Of what is happening every day

Everything is a recording

Of a recording of an awakening

And here you're standing in its way

The God of All Solutions Valentine

Every night my eager soul ascends

Like a balloon from a child's hand

Leaving my body on the bed

A weightless outline in the dark

Seeking the other side of the air

Up through the ceiling and the stairs

Until it tangles on some nebula

Or higher still slips into a trance

That weaves together broken scenes 

From the day before a puzzle

Reassembled from that other

More truthful side of me

A world familiar with no reason

So I spend the whole next day

Wondering to decode the context

Disconnecting all the dots 

Feeling the god of all solutions

Slipping from my thoughts

Tree's Valentine

Out in the forest of the flesh

Where the deep beasts prowl

Where I will be devoured

It takes about an hour

Or I will just stand there

Like a tree at the bottom

Of an abyss unshaken

I didn't know if I was dying

Or being born the top of the tree

Had just blown open and on

The updraft I was lifted

Wings rocked out of the dream

And that it was just waiting for me

To let go of its branches

And drift upward to the sun

Friedrich's Valentine

He is our Amfortas a king

Poor frightening Nietzsche

For who has suffered as much

Or been so easily misconstrued

As Job's defiant mountainous son

He swam in a sea of courage

And loved to be cold and alone

He flew to be free of love

His only inadequacy in flight

Not to have seen love coming

What alone could get him there

But I know how he hurt

When love refused his gift

And love became the enemy of love

Glorified Valentine

Too scorching or too old and lazy

To cut the grass and fuss with plants

I let the backyard naturalize

Into a wild walled garden

Weeds and flowers fighting it out

Vivid colors in a waving green

So by August it was in its glory

When I started to wonder about

The gardener implicit in the garden

The exactitude of the arrangements

Which happens when the sun

 Is free to coax up this or that 

New leaf from anywhere it wants

Fit now for a child to enter

Or an old man to sit

Abandoned Wisdom Valentine

A lifetime's library my dear

Book-shelves bullying every room

Began to weigh me down

The gravity of reading so much

And retaining much too little

Time to cull the lot

To separate the keepers from the dust

So much dust on the oldest heads

Grown white exuding wisdom

I never read a book I didn't like

So I boxed the ones I liked the most

And kept what no one anymore

Wants to own out-dated

Travelogues abandoned dictionaries

Useful if you have to stop a door

Carried Valentine

When I first saw the famous bridge 

Of Brooklyn in an early picture

I was surprised to find the ruins

Of an old cathedral stone

By stone carried over from

The old country to reconstruct

Or subtly evoke a lost

Sense of the divine that river

Before these bridges pinned

It down the flying Hudson

And then to walk across it

As if inside an enormous harp

And to be casual about it

As if it was nothing to be carried over

Sorry Valentine

Two shadow eyes

On the white ceiling

When the sun blinks

The cloud's eyes a muse

My messenger for today

Who looks down from the black

And white heights

Of the infinitely distant

Stars that bloomed last night

And die in the summer storms

Yes I am speaking to you

Grave abstraction of my dreams

Returning ephemeral eyes

Sorry to keep you waiting

Logical Valentine

If you don't recognize the existence of the gods

Then you don't recognize the existence of ideas

God is just the passing idea of you

The Idea conjuring its ideas

Without ever repeating itself

Until the earth and the stars

All the clamoring constellations

Are populated with its good

And bad ideas our bodies

Wrenched into their places

In another firmament its first

Grandiose sketch of an idea

How many blackboards did it fill

Until it reached the final equation

Random Valentine

What they meant and mean to me

In the daily discovery of memory

Random moments that flare up

Like waves in the general sea

Of thoughts' flotsam and haste

They stop and stare at me

Faces I half-recognize

Half-recognizing me

I see they cannot speak just glance

Like eyeballs staring through a fence

They see what I can't

My soul revealed to them

Which leaves them speechless

Though their eyes are full of thanks

Returned Valentine

When I finally noticed you were me

One morning in the middle of our lives

It was too late or too early to go back

We started to lose track of us

As separate or lost or gone

And tenderly and harshly over time

We lost our bearings

I know it seems strange

Becoming a part of everything

Like melting at the edges

But this time consciously fearlessly

So grateful to have come back

To being simple trees and grass

You a mountain me a lake

After Valentine

When the earth was covered with water

After everything had burned to ash

After you woke up on the island

Of yourself after the long

Trek north to the Burgenland

After the failed initiation

When you lost your second sight

And couldn't find your friend

And the flower of immortality

Slipped from your feeble hand

It must have been around then

You finally fell asleep

And the dream of your youth began

And you knew you would come again

Just Valentine

A broken off piece of rainbow

Fell through the window landed

On the floor a small triangle

Of unworldly colors

The germ-ghost of what

Became the world

Actually visiting me

I was just sitting there

As usual thinking of you

As a patch of radiant light

And I could see right through you

All your clever disguises

All the way back to when

We were first ours that night

We Are Always Protected Valentine

I said I don't know what I'm doing

When others have said they do

They have done their research

And found what they felt all along

But my not knowing hasn't stopped

My doing I'm always right

And wrong my companions

Who cherish uncertainty

Are always cheering me on

I know nothing about everything

I'm too awestruck to think

When they ask if I know

What I'm doing those who know

Let's Not Be Angry Anymore Valentine

COVID confusion perhaps brother

But more the pangs of conscience

The hot adrenaline of shame

For my argumentative self-serving

Attitude and arrogant words back then

After which I felt I lost you

You would never speak to me again

Aren't you amazed we know

So little about one another

Not just us but everyone's life

An only partly open door

Either widening or closing

Forgive me for slamming it in your face

I just forgot to be your brother

Hereditary Valentine

Was it a calculated move

When his father said no to him

Having foreseen the pain to follow

Was it carefully designed

As a labyrinthine plot

With no way out it seemed

But to return the way he came

He knew how inventive his father

Could be how he craved

To arrange every single thing

How his heart would ache

When his son ignored his warnings

Just as he knew he would

If he'd ever be free to love

Light Rain Valentine

When I'm right it feels inadvertent

When I'm wrong it feels willful

Like working in the yard in a light rain

Or stumbling on an old letter in a book

I was giving away what changed 

My life your words I had forgotten

From the fourth of my seven lives

Finally the rain forced me inside

Where I found your folded letter

Full of encouragement and love

Falling like a light rain in me

The kind of rain that gives you

Permission to keep on working

And knows the harvest will be rich

I Am Faust Valentine

Finally old reprobate Professor Faust

Gets rescued from himself

By a whole battalion of angels

While M. just stands there embarrassed

By his own sense of shame

But Faust still lives here with us

At the very pitch of darkness

His repentance still to come

And yet given a second chance

He didn't live to see the light

Dawn inside him at least not

In that lifetime but everything

Rests on the right location

And you never know when

The heart will stop and turn in

Every Night Valentine

Domestic cosmic comic

Book that we are just

Making supper up and plans

Laying together on the couch

Getting ready for another what-a-day

I kiss your feet eternity

The way you just keep spinning

Out myths and fables that finally

Put us both to sleep

And we can leave our bodies behind

Poor instruments of torture and joy

Resting comfortably on the earth

As we rise up through the ranks

Of angels and the starry dead
To retrieve their hopes for us

Poet's Valentine

Usually I imagine you

Standing at the edge of an aspen wood

Sunny windless afternoons

In a silence so deep no bird

Would dare penetrate

And yet you call me here

To ask if I can feel it too

The visible music of his arrival

Setting the leaves to quaking

Rays of the sun falling at his feet

His foot-prints on the pond

That leave you speechless

Holding me in your arms

But I can only imagine you

Short-Lived Valentine

Cometary beings like Shelley or Keats

Or the brave Hypatia who sweep

Into and out of our atmosphere

The short-lived who blaze through

The night sky like a body

Running from a burning building

Itself engulfed in flames

Impossible to extinguish

As they speed over the horizon

On that long journey back to us

In the darkness behind the earth

But time here only to get

As far as the emergency of youth

And ring the fire alarm of truth

Better Valentine

In the beginning there was racism

It was always hiding behind 

The next tree in the beautiful garden

The enmity of two brothers

Beginning the hatred of others

The satisfied and the unsatisfied

The one who stays for her father

And the one who must get away

The refusal to change

Igniting the spark of freedom

Didn't they both just want

To be appreciated for their gifts

For which they had to give up

Feeling better than their brother

The Four of Me Valentine

Constant stickler for the truth

Best of the melancholic breed

And you the proof of sensible goodness

With that sanguine grin on your face

And you who makes us eat

Our vegetables and say our prayers 

O lord forgive me for my fiery

Outbursts and the walls I shake

It's not that I didn't have great

Teachers to goad me on

It's just that if you're going

To tell the truth and be good

Sometimes you have to lose your shit

And just spit it out

For beauty's sake unafraid

Spiraling Valentine

Lefty Lucy and tidy Righty

He breathes out his life to her

And she just breathes it back again

They're screwed into one another

You say with a straight face

To hold something in place

To snatch it out of space

And ever-destructive time

Feeling the ever-loosening bolt

Of loneliness and lust

Accede to loyal friendship

The spiral of days ascending

And descending ladders

Love that lifts us up

And helps us down again

Replicated Valentine

The speech of animals is all vowels

The speech of plants is wind and light

But it was we who brought the hard

Consonants capturing them in words

And if you trace it back

To the first smell of words

From far out at sea maybe

You can feel what languages feel

Assembling their storms and calms

All these languages rushing toward

A replica of living sound and light

When you spoke to me

Of our destiny and plight