What Valentine

A country can be taken to be

A single personality whose cells

And parts work on mechanically

Somewhere after thirty

The biography shifts

And all that was gained

Or lost in childhood

Slithers toward Jerusalem

Never was a town more taken

Apart and patched together

The city of a personality

A mother and a child

What does the world hate more

I ask you fathers

In Valentine

The why is in the how

The when is in the where

The that is in the this

And I am in your arms

This is my philosophy today

Holding and being held

Its central theme and mood

Of which there is never enough

Good news bad news

Both excuse embrace

Freely given freely received

In which whole bodies

Listen closely to each other's

Hearts thrumming in unison

The grief is in the joy

November Valentine

It's good I have a spare life

When this one has to go

My dreamed me at night

Where strangely I feel

More alive than in this one

And where I wake to a world

Hardening out of that one

It can be dizzying at times

Going back and forth

Whoever I am in my dream

Always seems the better me

Someone I would like to be

More honest and more brave

Fallen but getting up

Short Course Of My Loves Valentine

Mr. Keats and Mr. Shelley

Compose the underbelly

Of modern poetry

They speak again in Yeats

Who looked like Blake

And swore like Baudelaire

Who kept the flame alive

Even as it consumed him

I imagine the poets on earth

Meeting up annually with those

Who go on writing them in heaven

Where they all get drunk together

Taxied home by their angels

Muttering their dreams

Your Valentine

My boundless pride

Is always quarreling

With my inadequate humility

Like anxious parents

Over their restless ego child

Who must be torn apart

Needing them both

And needing to escape them both

But the child must be rich

And prodigal before it crosses

The sixty leagues of love

It must lose all its hopes

And laughter except

This last one you

Still Singing Valentine

Three tasks the heart is gifted

To think to feel to act

And occasionally to sing together

When the spirit lifts its baton

And some new strain dips down

Into the corporeal brain

A gold glimmer come and gone

Of light becoming song

That stuns and thrills

But never lasts too long

But just enough to hear

They're still singing us into being

That whole orchestra of gods

On this ordinary morning