How Much Valentine

Whatever happened to that needlepoint

Of the four seasons or was it

The four graces you worked on

During your anxious pregnancy

Will it show up at a thrift store

Some hundred years from now

A treasure rediscovered

A beauty for a bargain

But only you and I will know

How much you wanted a horse

Now that we lived in the country

Or how much I enjoyed splitting wood

In the service of that winter's fires

While you were stitching together

The perfect picture of our daughter 

Warming My Feet in the Sun Valentine

One wants to embalm the past

One wants to control the future

If you think of the kinds of forces 

Always working in the soul

Don't you remember how it all

Started out as a continuation

No end because no beginning 

A warm day creeping

Out of a cold night

When night was love

And day was freedom

Before the stars sketched out

Their first visions of us

Before a word was said 

Cindy's Valentine

Isn't it our desire

To win the respect

Of the people around us

Those that inspire us

To some passion

Isn't it our intention

To be appreciated

To be loved by those

Who breath life

Right into our veins

The presence of all

Those people we have been

And have yet to be 

Cheering us on 

Taken Valentine

Today I lost my purple tree

With all its chattering birds

As if they took it with them

When they knew they had to fly

Northward or southward

Leaving me to mourn

In an expanded sky

Thirty years of shade uplifted

Easily by the blazing sun 

The eerie silence and stillness

Of no leaves falling in the yard

The question in the air

Of how and if and when

To start all over again 

All Souls Valentine

Too early for the future

Too late for the past

I join their souls around me

For the festival of death

We who are living are dead for a day

We who are dead are living new lives

Together we celebrate the loss

Of death remember the day 

Death died the door flew open

The flowering graves

Where we can sit together 

And make a meal of silly stories

Of our mysterious lives

Just to join and lift us up again

Opening Valentine

Often through the day I say

'Give me thy peace thy strength

Help to know thy way' words

From a childhood prayer

Or something I made up

In a moment of crisis

I don't remember now

But is it enough to just ask

If I don't open to receive them

If I don't take a moment

To feel them pouring in

Filling and flowing through me 

Strength to call my own

Peace I have never known  

A Blessed Day Valentine

I look back over the day

At all the things I didn't do

They would have been mistakes 

But for the karma of inaction

Some I simply forgot about

Some I decided could wait

What isn't done

Doesn't need to be undone

What did get done

Were the dishes

After a quick lunch

And the pages of a book

That devoured the afternoon

And left me reading in the dark 

Doing what can't be done 

Upstream Valentine

Trying to put one thing

Together with another

One foot in front of the other

Without tripping too much

This goes with that

This will have to wait

I'm thinking of salmon

For supper swimming upstream

Through this rocky night

I'm thinking how you caught me

That day at the shore

Of the rest of my life

How I wanted to be caught

How I wanted nothing more 

Left Behind Valentine

The farmer in me argues

With the doctor in me

This tree will have to go

It's already prone on the ground

Its roots torn up by the storm

Struck down in full bloom

Alive with bees and finches

The farmer wants to let it rest there

Until it loses all its leaves

The doctor orders surgery 

The removal of the heart

Which he says will go on beating

In the space it leaves behind

Where you can sit and weep 

All This Valentine

Sun then rain then sun

Then rain then sun 

A flicker in the distance

A bird of light

Sweeping through the yard

Come then gone

Grayness bringing brilliance

Pursuing one another

Sun crashing down 

Rain slinking back in

Some being struggling in the south

Must be conjuring all this

Giving with one hand

Taking back with the other 

Flaming Valentine

We live for these earnest fall hours

Like waking up in a dream 

We see how things have grown

More joyful and more dour

The last of trees and flowers

The flaming angel returns

To take his garden back

Only revealing at the end

All the gold he was hiding

And you find yourself as if

The only scarecrow left

 Standing in a harrowed field

Deciding not to be dead

But to go for a walk instead 

From The Foothills Valentine

Liberation is all

In the digestion

The mind is metabolic

It chews its food 

Or swallows it whole

Today it learned

A berry grows sweeter

If it hears a recording

Of bees played around it

So many things we all once knew

Are having to be recovered

What the mind has in mind

Grows larger every day

The night merely rounding it off 

Ever Valentine

The future is the only way we know

What was really happening in the past

Even if much of it is lost to us

Even while it was being lived

And we were caught up in our piece of it

We look back on our brothers and sisters

And wonder how they are looking

Across at us to see what

We will make of them

And if their lives left us

Just enough love to go on

And take us with them

Counting on one another

As if they had ever left 

Not Panicking Valentine

Before you noticed it

You locked yourself out of your car

With your phone and keys inside

And meanwhile mine

Wouldn't start on the other

Side of town and I

Had left my phone at home

For a long time it seemed

We couldn't reach one another

Rescue calling out to rescue

Messages not sent or not received 

What was that all about

Both stranded in a helpless place

A dry-run for dying

Or for being born again 

Bottomline Valentine

Where does the vileness come from

Ignorance accounts for a lot of it 

But it must live at the end

Of a long road of grievances

Three sparrows are looking at me

Asking me this question

They come close

Pecking at the ground

But their hunger only

Trusts me so far

They see I am a man

And capable of anything

What reassurance can I offer

They are safe with me 

Don't Cry For Me Arizona Valentine

It's fall that saves

Summer from itself

Headlong summer with

Its overwhelming warmth

A lot got done

But fall sits us down

Inside we start to sink

Pulled back to the earth

By the gravity of our love for it

Even as it abandons us

Taking all its riches with it

Snow becomes beautified tears

And we the fields it falls on  

My Two Teachers Valentine

One says take off your armor

The other says put your armor on

One says you have to do it alone

The other that you're never alone

One tells of one good and two evils

The other speaks of an empty mind

One says you must change your life

The other to just watch it gently

In one a man became a god

In the other a god became a man

From one there was liberation

From the other resurrection

One spoke of now

The other of always 

After Raphael Valentine

The sureness of the hand

That painted these tulips

All of April there

In a row that blue after rain

Washes all their colors out 

Caught in that moment

Their pale complexions

Turn faces into cups 

You can feel the flexing

Of their rubbery leaves 

Your fingers reaching  

I bow to read the name

Of this immortal master

Emma seven years old 

At Last Valentine

The self-renunciation

That lives in the rain

From rivers ascending

Into mountainous clouds 

Roaming the landscape

The insight of the lightening

Exposing the minds

Of impatient gods

The grumbling after

But the rain itself

Brims with forgiveness

Floods of it as if

Without it there will be

No life at all nor love 

My Religion Valentine

To all the many religions of the world

I would presume to add my own 

The church of my weaknesses

The sanctuary of my soul

I propose seven acknowledgements

The refusal of self-loathing 

Both in oneself and others

A love for infants and small things

The loneliness of arguments

Except for those forgiven

The all-pervading presence

Of a guiding wisdom

The only one I trust

To make sense of it all

The other three to come 

Lost Valentine

My dear friend went searching

For her daughter among the homeless

She hadn't thought there could be

So many showing her picture around

She felt ashamed they could be

So kind but none had seen her

That picture her only memory

Held fast and clearly alive

At that particular moment

Are the good swallowed up 

And the rest of us left guilty

Is it only when we have nothing

We can share all we have

The poor we have always with us

Until there are no more poor 

Might Still Become Valentine

What does it take

For any given tree

Or flower to stir

The heart to quiver

Swaying in the breeze

It can't be easy

To be beautiful

See what your beauty made

A handful of seeds

Making a fool of time

Continuation is a feature

And flowers are not gogs

They show us what we were

Once beauty had a hold of us 

Back in the olden days 

Michaelmas Moon Valentine

Who am I this morning

Triangulating my position

With autumn sun's full moon

Retrograde turning direct

In my wobbling orbit

Round you my loves 

In squares and trines

Losing and finding our way 

The will of the dance

If we listen to the music

Fearful and joyful in turns 

While you are over there

And yet are always near 

Across the great abyss 

Night Flight Valentine

How all this weight becomes weightless

The secret finally revealed to us

Longed for from the beginning

Of our first being on the earth

Diaphanous and floating as I

Feel now in my window-seat

Bumping along in the twilight

With these many strangers crammed

Together to get somewhere 

Leaving home or going home

That must be the Mississippi down there

Our history in the cities lighting up

From which for a few hours

We're exempt suspended

Heading toward that rainbow

Of the falling sun tonight 

Come One Valentine

Young Freud was of a dark mind

Turning the inside out

Old Darwin was of a mild mind

Only the outside mattered to him

Forgetting the inside yonder

But there did come one

Of a sounder fuller mind

Only a smidgen listened to

Who took them deeper

Into the marriage 

Of inside and outside

Who showed them how

They are woven together

Into a seamless child 

From the Book of Butterflies Valentine

What I can see of its wings

Stretching out around me

Invisibly but I can feel them 

Opening and closing while it sips

A bit of moisture from the grass

Black on the top side with blue

Iridescent spots along the edge

Bright copper on the other side

I can almost hear it breathing

Calmly lifting them up and down

Only a few moments to spare me

Before it rises and flutters off

Other memories to scatter

Other eyes to astound 

At My Love's House Valentine

We have only two dreams

One while asleep I think

And one while awake

Two sides of a flipped coin

The text on one face

The painting on the next

Which one should I follow

The blue coming up from the southeast

Bringing the wind close behind it

Or the leaves falling at my feet

Someone is holding me tight

Someone I've only just met

At any moment I'll wake up

Only the waking is endless 

Autumnal Valentine

Do the gnomes love the rain

Floating in their flooded houses

Pouring the drops down

To the dreaming roots

Do the undines grow enormous wings

Hanging from the last leaves

Running in and out of one another

When the light flares up

Do the slyphs in silk formations

Slip the clouds right through

The bright mountain passes

Pushing it out of the way

So the salamanders can feast

On the fruit fallen there 

Gazing Valentine

At a certain point in the day

The sun levels its gaze

Right at me through the trees

I try to stay humble 

And not stare back at him

But my eyes are moths

Batting against that blaze

Raying through the leaves 

Of course the sun is a solar god

And must someday consume us

But meanwhile at the horizon

For an hour or so some days

He lets us look right at him

Lowering himself for us humans

As if we could be his equal

Absorbed in his tender gaze 

 

Birthday Valentine

Now I see my life

And death on earth

As just two threads

From some immortal

Personage aloft

Sitting at a loom

Or thumbing a guitar

A loiterer in gardens

Such as I've become down here

I admit I didn't want

To accept it for a long time

I quarreled with the thought

That I could be great or good

I could be everything around me

And might have always been

And still could be myself