Maybe Valentine

Even if Orpheus had been successful

It might have been too early to save his love

Maybe only parting could rescue them both

After all he had his music to heal

And she her nursing of the dead

Thousands arriving every night and day

How else would we have the false memory

Of all their long letters back and forth

When he let go of her he had to decide

How much of him was left

She would have wanted to go on

Or did she push his hands away

At the last moment hearing the cries

Of a deeper woman giving birth inside

A Song Is No Material Thing Valentine

What are you contemplating?

Birdsong, how can they sing?

A song is no material thing.

You have to have a soul to sing,

A strong will and a pure desire

With nothing egotistical about it,

A repertoire of hard-won notes,

Some dissonant, some beautiful.

You have to be subject to fits

And starts and long passages

Of repetitive climbing to get

To that breathless triad

Where the soul is scattered

Sunlight on rippling leaves.

Scaled Valentine

An obscure puppetry operates 

From above to below against 

The weight of bodies holding it down

An upright line passing through

A vast and misty crossing ground

Where breath and blood are lodged

Where aimless thought and careless desire

Are cycled through the furnace heart

Reduced to ash or polished to glass

Or usually some of both

If you think of the earth as a shrinking head

And the moon as its phantom limbs

You can get a sense of the scale

When the heart embraces the sun

New Orleans Valentine

Approaching eighty I was introduced

To an eight-hundred year old oak

My friend touched it with a prayer

Petting its sculpted animal hide

While I stood back counting branches

Whole trees themselves they could have been

Wooden posts holding them up

But the miracle was the unfallen leaves

Her fresh descendants no mother

Could be prouder of such faces

When she was just a seed

Chartres was being raised

By a quadrivium of artists

A new thinking was descending

On the whole world back then

And this one oak was singing

Phantom Valentine

Rain-hive humming on the roof

Honey of a sound I love to taste

Curled in my cloudy bed alone

Too early to wake too late to sleep

Nursing the embryo of a dream

Assembling cell by cell drop by drop

From so many discarded dreams

The outline of a head made visible

Brilliant lightening flesh

Distant quickening of limbs

As you crawl in next to me

Phantom of love I mourn

Here present and yet hovering

In the future to be born

The Sudden Lives of Clouds Valentine

Yesterday I was up there

Among the contrails and the clouds

And today when I look up

There's a great cross pointing

To the four directions and a third

White line just now intersecting

It right at the center-point ESE

All of it erased in a few minutes

So I'm not surprised you might

Have missed it as I almost did

Yesterday up there I wondered

If the souls of the dead experience

Like us the turbulence moving up

Through rain clouds as we climbed

Shaken and afraid until we reached

Their vast towering cities

Alive and peaceful in the sun

Tucked Away Valentine

The plan today is to write a list

Of all the things I need to do

When I get back from my trip

In four or five hundred years

A few relevant papery ideas

Tucked away in a book or face

I might discover in my teens

Picking right up where I left off

In my conversation with you

Stretching now over centuries

Both eternal and temporary as

The love that's still to be found

I mean when you look at a seed

Can you not imagine the flower

Spared Valentine

Only one of the ten returned

To express his joyful thanks

But I wonder about the other nine

Did they rush home to amazed

Family and friends who struggled

To understand how this could happen

But what could be said to explain

That one minute they were doomed

And the next they were free and whole

Did they feel they deserved it

The magical gift of a second chance

Or did that grateful one urgently

Run after them to say my friends

Your life was spared but not your soul

Temple of the I Valentine

What if after a long difficult journey

Without ever knowing where you're going

Through rushing crowds and smoky war-zones

Climbing over rock walls and sleeping

In cold fields with restless sheep

Following photographs and maps you saved

Of someone else's memories

People-watching in blooming parks

Searching for a stranger's face

Who finally appears to lead you

Into the depths of an ancient tomb

On the outskirts of some desert town

And leaves you there with a little book

To prove this was all no dream

Maybe Valentine

My little orange tree sighed and died

Did I not water it enough in the heat

One hundred dollars I paid

For the prospect of something sweet

And to swoon to the scent

Of its carved ivory flowers

Privately in my own backyard

Spring is such an intimate thing

But two green branches remain

On the brown leafless stalk

And cooler days will soon return

So maybe there's a stub of hope

Still struggling underground

Dreaming of green and orange

Shopping Valentine

A rather large moon-faced older woman

Asked me if I would hold her place

In line while she went back to grab

Something she'd forgotten in a minute

And leaving her cane in her empty cart

Limped off down a crowded aisle

Returning with two large chocolate bars

And a long explanation of her hip-

Replacement a year old now

And still not healing how could it

If I'm always leaning on my cane

Though the surgeon says I need it

But maybe what I need is a second opinion

And then despite all her friendly smiling

I asked if she was in a lot of pain

Yes she grimaced all the time

And passed some of it to me pleading

To take it home in my grocery bag

For which I was much obliged

Foundational Valentine

I chose to believe one day

Though clearly not today

My memory will return to me

In all its pre-and-post array

A harvest from its decay

A few sticky seeds will stay

Put where I put them

In the stomach of a swan

Or in some imagined ground

Out there in the rocky fields

Of my awareness of remembrance

Patiently waiting for the perfect day

What's left of me remains

Counting on the sun and rain

And look behold they come

Homeless Valentine

Aren't even the little sticks and stones

The fallen branches of the palm

I use to weave my creaking hut

Borrowed from some beach or loaned

To me from some terrible storm

The flotsam from which I string

Together the thought of a home
And plant myself inside its filtered

Light a door open to the sea

In the radical half of life

I decided it was only the magic

Of discovery that appealed to me

My little hut the tip of an iceburg

Over the depths I'd yet to see

The Present Is The Past's Emergency

Out of my empty morning brain

Nothing no one no where to go

Suddenly an unknown bird

Lets loose hysterically a flood

Like some Sandra rushing into

The room to warn us of a fire

Hidden in the walls about to roar

And yet somehow sounding cheerful

About the way fire calls to us

After all in its ascensions

And then she stopped that unknown

Bird if bird it was caught

Preaching to the leaves again

Changes Saved Valentine

What if at the end you could keep

Three or four days to spend

Under a strict editor's pen

What would you of your life

Delete or expand or amend

So it all reads more truthfully

More succinctly than your long drafts

Those mountains of slag you imagined

You'd have to dig through to get

To the treasure of your days

To those few final sentences

With joy and celebration

And plant a period on your heart

All your changes saved

Only What's Forgiven Can Be Free Valentine

Within the prison of these lines

Where every morning I sit and wait

Assessing the severity of my crimes

Staring through these bars of words

At you my self-constructed fate

That bird who mocked me in the spring

Shrieks in late summer her alarm

Enough to jar my body from my soul

Practicing my planned release

Into the freedom of your forgiveness

All you plants and stones I harmed

All you waves and birds I missed

Who wait to take me back

And assure me I'll return

Archival Valentine

Now I can cherish all your chiding

Always trying to encourage me

My unpunctuated heart

Moves more closely simply

Into sentences with you

This was not my thought at first

When my hand wrote these words

But you'd already thought it through

And could produce in me

The pictures to prove it from when

We rode the long peninsula

Down to your inlet lair

You could honor being together

And being apart almost equally

Knew out of so many

We share the same star

Baja - Into The Pleistocene Valentine

I find myself waiting for yesterday's crazed hills

To fall through me again.  Some slip away, of

course (nothing's perfect), except those hundreds

Of abandoned houses we passed, roofless

Mortuaries of sun and rain, now no one's

Dying in empty rooms of weeds, heavenly

Views from windows never marveled at.

I imagine their builders sleep now as birds

In fields, or on hillsides as boulders,

Because so much labor amounts to nothing,

Come January's weeks of rain, come

This heart-breaking green again, only

Love could approve such mouths of flame.

Still I wait (their word for hope)

For those hills to fall further inside me, those

sudden ascensions, turnings, those lurching gaps --

There a far smile of ocean glimpsed, here 

A mammoth semi perched as we creep past

A cliff's edge, needing just a push.

Rounding a lupine-flooded rise

A burro in the bed of a pick-up, two

Brown sparrows asleep on his back,

The soul of a nation, you sighed,

Bumping nonchalantly into town.

The Difficulty With Love Valentine

In one sense I started out

Wanting to love all those

Who are not loved I was decided

On it starting with the most difficult

Myself and I would feel at once

A wide Niagara of resistance

As if in a barrel going over the falls

When I would start to talk my love-

Talk and say I was not

Quite there yet I mean I do

Like you but we don't

Really know one another

I mean you're the whole world

And I'm just starting out