This World's Valentine

What can we surmise

About this world's aspirations

Its perennial adolescence

Its struggles to survive

If left to its own devices

On this lovely fall morning

A few years ago my neighbor's child

All he could do was scream

And now I overhear him say

'Poppa, Poppa, look I...'

One more I in the world

With its pressing needs and joys

And a smile to stop time

With each new word

Walking These Days Valentine

An arrested fall

Upright regained

Holding on to the wall

Steady Freddy

First steps last steps

Re-learn to crawl

And hoist and stand

Old body new man

Momma's guiding hand

Letting me go

Letting me fall

Where was I headed

The adventure of it all

Until I heard you call

Cor Ad Cor Valentine

Coroneola an old Latin word

A kind of autumn rose

A heart and a hello

Now unseen unheard

Aeneas must have known it

Helen wore it in her hair

A color and an odor

Dissolving in the air

Back when there was only

Blue and red the other

Colors waiting to be bled

The Coroneola sang in autumn

As it must have once to me

Still living heart among the dead

Come The Renaissance Valentine

So it must have been with the gods

In their art of painting the human being

The master would make a sketch

Outlining the central figures

Completing only a hand or a face

While his apprentices would come behind

Filling in the details emerging

From the mountains in the background

All thought out ahead of time

And sometimes the master would return

To erase even his own work

With a wash of greenish paint

And start again to sketch

A whole new human being

A Little More Valentine

Laying in bed at night

Glancing back over the day

I feel the world whirling

Around me a humming hurricane

Of lit-up cities and barren spaces

I try to be peaceful after all

In the eerie eye of my storm

And focus on the random things

That happened to me

My few waking thoughts

Until I come back to your face

Having lunch together

While you divulged a little

More of your mystery to me

Just before I fall asleep

Unseen Valentine

Are those two saguaros new

Next to the optometrist's

Across from the post office

I've never noticed them before

Five-footers in their adolescence

But when I ask I'm told

They were planted years ago

Right on that busy corner

I've passed a thousand times before

Finally stopped for the light

I pulled up next to their green 

Presence and asked them really

How long they 'd been standing there

But they just gazed at one another

Two lost souls stuck in traffic

Far from home an old man

Blankly staring up at them

In The Beginning Was Geometry Valentine

Of the infinite number of ways

Three lines could come together

(If lines could think)

A perfect triangle would form

Once in that series

An instrument to be seized

The gods could really use

To unwind another world

They could feel how the heart

Would have to emerge first

Right out of a fiery circle

While it was still burning

Then plunged into cold water

Warmed and filled with light

And the pulse resume its yearning

Better Half Valentine

The part of me

That doesn't love me

 Fortunately married 

All these years

To the part of me that does

After our brief

Passionate affair

But you kept leaving me

For some other life

Then showing up again

No where else to go

Begging me to take you in

How could I love to live

Without you by my side

Who else will forgive my sins

Visitor's Valentine

My restless cat keeps staring up

Annoyed at the empty chair

Where she often loves to sit

As if it's already occupied

By some invisible spirit

Only she can see

Who I have called

To visit me a creature

Of the sun that fills

And warms the seat

While I wait opposite

In chilly shade for it to say 

How its light gets made

From love that's lived

On such another day

At Hand Valentine

Is Virgo Venus redivivus 

Beauty rising from her bed

Standing to receive at last

The serpent and the crown

How long will she lie asleep

Dreaming of that star's gleaming

Nesting in her growing womb

Is she frightened so alone

A quiet comely girl called to be

The sorrowful queen of joy

Did she pause before she rose

Conscious of the gods' decision

Swaying toward the balance

Feeling the sun bearing down

The moon carving its incision

Finally Valentine

Finally I got down upon my knees

And pruned away the choking weeds

Invading my gold lantana

Prayers down always work

Unless they lead to willful action

Leggy the lantana had grown

And needed cutting of its own

Some straying branches had to do

Unfortunately without their flowers

Until finally only one was left

A new unfolding umbel

A bud made up of many

Tiny flowers woven in a whirl

Delivered from the evil

Of this too eager world

Promised Valentine

Don't forget morning

Actually gets its start

At the midnight hour

When the darkness

Falls over into

The completeness

Of its illusion

Long before the light

Clocks in if

Sun there is

That dawn is a promise

The darkness

However deep

Even if reluctantly

Must keep

Somehow Valentine

He says the gods go on surviving

On the spirit bread we bring them

Our own souls baked and steaming

That aroma in the morning

Their tongues watering for a taste

Of some sweetness saved

Or even a stale crust to chew

But somehow they make do

On our thin earthly gruel

And get on with their daily tasks

Of plowing and reaping

Pushing the chariot sun

Up over their seeded ground

And doling out the rain

Only Today Valentine

When we divide yesterday 

Into tomorrow something

Is always left over

The remainder we call today

A pittance of hours

For our chores and prayers

But how carry over the one

Still living body we love

If only for another few words

Before we fall asleep again

And sail out on eternity's seas

Our dreams' frail boats

In search of something

We can call a soul

Solely Valentine

Tap-tap-tap the flicker's beak

On the door of a dying tree

That opens on a vestibule of blue

A life without leaves to see

One's way back to the trailing sun

But just enough to stand there

Like a naked phallic Greek

Expounding his geometry 

Of light-constructed lines

Crossing one another in the wind

A skeleton of pregnant limbs

Solely dependent now

On the charity of stars the moon's

Slow keening in the snow

Remembered Valentine

I went out walking in my head

Among the waves of words

Written on the stony graves

All my dead thoughts

Turning in their tidy plots

Who fought in heaven's wars

And fell to earth like rain

In search of that single name

Hidden among roses I remember

Planting in another life

Finding only an empty tomb

Still warm from the sun

That filled it with a body's heat

A heart just entering a womb

Egg Of Light Valentine

The almost real and the post-real

The surreal and the plain real

All seem combined in an egg

Dangling above the heads

Of a couple getting married

In one of Raphael's paintings

The critics think it a symbol

Of purity overcoming passion

But I'm not sure it isn't

Something Raphael added

Out of his own second sight

Not a custom of that time

All of his Madonnas are lovers

And all of his lovers Madonnas

All he painted was the light

Unrescued Valentine

I climbed too high

And many books and I

Came crashing to the floor

I lay immobilized

My lifetime's library

Pummeling my chest

One grazed my closing eye

Until all was silence rising

From a hundred sacred texts

It was the end of knowledge

A few broken bones

A few unfinished novels

I couldn't but moan and grin

Watching the dust settle in

I Call Him Buster Valentine

I'm thinking of setting

A mouse-trap for that

Clever cat hiding

Among the branches

Grown too close

To the bird-bath

Where the creaking doves

And eager sparrows come

To drink I have

To cut them back

But that's just one

Of several tasks

I never seem to get to

I say I'm waiting

For my friend to come

On that perfect fall day

To prune and rake with me

To put the garden to bed

And celebrate our dead

And feed that ravenous cat

Double's Dream Valentine

I ran into my double

In last night's dream

We were descending

A set of narrow

Mental stairs together

Him close behind

A large man in black

Hat and voluminous cloak

I stopped to let him

Pass but smiling

Through his moustache

He insisted I go first

So I hurried on ahead

Veritably flying down

Those steps to where

Our train was waiting

To take us through

All night we sat

Trading secrets

And philosophies by morning

We had reached a compromise

He would leave me

His cloak and hat

And I would leave him my eyes

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