Gay Valentine

The hummingbird isn’t the gay bird
but you knew that on some level
the way Lorca denies his effeminate side
to reject even that much
brotherhood is republican

but at what point does this become
a gay poem or lurch over
into feeling like an overcast poem
I started out filming a butterfly
fluttering around my face

then cut to the butterfly’s face
huge now and searching
into my face and then
a hummingbird came by
stared at both of us and fled.

Peering Valentine

Something peers
in at me
when I sit alone he says
how much life thankfully
others live for us

so we wouldn’t have to repeat
ourselves diligent as grace
we could be for what utters us
a kind of morning experience
you pick the day

but no one goes there anymore
too spiritual or lyrical those
colorful stuffed fish on the walls
looking more alive than when alive
and everyone eating at one table.

Iranian Fathers Day Valentine

To those who go out confidently to cities
living and chipping at ancient restraints
with the machinery of slow canals
and the pensive rage of slogans
wiping their blood on the walls

we celebrate today the failures
of sad fathers whose sons
go sonless confidently off to wars
or widespread riots the best
they could come up with

who keep for themselves
what to do (confidently)
with their rejected gift of self
whether to reject him too
or let him kill them.

Stand Still Valentine

The curved eye
in written e
the names
small birds
fly off to

the ash
everything threatens
to burn to
which is harder
to be with God

or be without one
once every year
we prisoners fall
not far
from freedom.

Listening Valentine

Upwind
of you
I could feel
hauled-off
the feature
I preferred
after all
was of you
the garden
who said no
bargain last
who listens
to anyone
as I listen
to you?

Lost Valentine

A man who talks continually
to himself out loud like a child
reading well dressed walking
the streets returning a small
package in a plastic bag

so you know what century
even if not what bed ruined
his absence swelled his names
with the features of private
associations the manners of

a musician notating snow in
order to have it at the end
of Africa in his hands that
exhilaration and suspense
as dedicatory as a poem.

Thinker's Valentine

They taste a bronze breeze
what carries of unknown
destinies and bestows
them on us painterly
and wars crowd in

not to call holy unholy
what does appear to them
finely and we
laughable anthills
each a head whose

thoughts scurry around
its royal corpse
just imagine
being a slave
to your thoughts.

Seaside Valentine

Trying to quench
an inner sourness
with sugar and doom
trying to enter
while imaging the room
only you could do it
swim off in a sea of courage
everywhere only waves
of burning courage
and you swimming there
I was laying on the bed
when you entered my head
I was looking out the window
when you fled.

Arriving Valentine

Pain has no issues with me
she runs right
down my street like
a little girl in a
washed-out summer dress

the mother of a city of pain
another lover’s
forgiveness or revenge
the world boarded-up
with some of both

but let me show you
to your room
your stanza
where you can get
settled in.

Reductive Valentine

Eventually poetry had wanted to
individualize the voice of being
by becoming the most secretive
of all the arts really ancient scary
in its foraging pillaging and patching

up the past but once its letters
had imprisoned all the words
it became seductive and reactive
wonder and reverence nearly driven
from the murmurs of the world

and now turned into text
its moving lips
cannot speak or breath
or reach across to
you and kiss your dangling mouth.

See You Valentine

The mere outside
the more inside
a plane takes off
from my brain
a bird elbows

my kidneys
am I awake yet
how long will it
take you to see you
in the morning

tremble sometimes
how narrowly we
escape
our captors
their raptures.

Days of '09 Valentine

When the trellis leaves off
the vine tangles around itself
building a rope upward
for the sounds outside
to enter its dream

but when it wakes up
it’s sitting in some green music
last night’s rain hard inside it
water running somewhere
renouncing itself as it does

as tears do
for still not having wrung
it all out the laughter
of course continues on
afresh.

Holderlin Valentine

I could strangle Holderlin
for hiding out so long
except maybe he was psychically
imprisoned by too much walking
and heartbroken of course

by too much loving
of a certain kind
what do the events of one’s life
have to do with the noise of roses
our weighted heads

calm as pear halves
afloat on sunshine kisses
a world whose walls
only reached as far
as we could love.

Fatal Valentine

The tearful erasing of a natal
chart as a clear result of rebirthing
into a human who would really
rather not have to hurt someone
as a condition of his being

surrender says you become
that thing for a while
the unnerving facing of a fatal
morning in someone else’s
tortured memory mall

memory is difficult said
mockingbird who flings out
sketches for songs
each year more frantic
more prolific than before.

Sides Valentine

To give up
in defeat
is not surrender
waiting attentively
is not defeat

nor the whole conquest
devotion relinquishes
as she bends her abdomen
planting a seed
on a leaf

she is large
containing multitudes
he is small
a single self
whose side are you on?

Furious Valentine

To love a red geranium
you don’t have to be an old lady
those mansions
at the end of
self-importance

the Mothers Goethe met
on his journey to the center
of the soul were furies tamed
but furies first
and therefore heartbroken

they knew only
the one in love
with all things is free
they could say
who was worthy of them.

Forgotten Valentine

What the gods wrought
the gods forgot

or we the gods forgot
classical projection plus

minimal reflection
equals maximum rejection

but if these beauties
are the dregs

of the spirit what
must it be

kindly or clinging
all the way from Atlantis

something that must suffer
to still be with us.

Chicken's Valentine

Do you need a poem
to hypnotize you
so you can cross the road
whatever happens to a chicken
wonder begins it

but for the non-technician
who stumbles reading aloud
a poem that’s a nurse
making him skate on his ankles
isn’t always helpful

except when it is
because absolutely nothing
gets accomplished
through thinking alone
that’s how we got here love.

Breezy Valentine

He would run
right up to the brink
of non-being to look
over into that hole there
did I hold him back

I know I held him
but did I do it right
calling and calling
to him from
another brink

our footing steep
or sure the lake below
unloosening
a lovely breeze
tonight.

Code For Valentine

These descriptions however
as applied in the abstract
to war crimes by lengthy
probably false justice
it’s all in the rebound he said

lose the rain she said
we speak in a code
of longing what are
the diaries we come
to see of others who

inspire or deceive us
imagine an art
that practices making
beings by speaking words
never before comprehended.

Bipolar Valentine

Realism is thought to work
through a series of sensual
phenomena embodied
in active beings with
varying powers of perception

there are terrorists out there
I mean tourists in the spirit
but no one believes it
anymore unlike a case
of genuine idealism

where there are internal forces
to be fought over
and the crudest impressions
give purpose and direction
thought a mere deletion.

Crossing Valentine

It’s hard to believe pain
made this lofty blue sky
the chances of pleasure
really doing its part
to perceive this creature

who crosses it
imagining his head
becoming three heads
his skin this blunt
blue flayed and re-grafted

every day bigger
and clearer
deducting what dies
from what goes
wondering on.

Free Valentine

Waiting for the moon
to come up in the wind

feeling like a galleon or pollen
pushed around the same room

when the great doors fly open

what carries us aloft
is free but not convenient

and summer is a movie
Doris Day Is Gay

it’s OK really I
remember the same summers

their lakes and leaky kayaks
their fish excuses

when the great doors flew open.

Ice Age Valentine

You know what cures
a mind like a sieve
a case of the dumb-ass
having a bird
in your own big mouth

for a brain a nerve
the bone is the tumor’s problem
a chipped shoulder
go soak yourself
haywire

today I would like to drive you
through hilly country
where I used to live
rivers and valleys
no ice age ever smeared.

Saturn's Valentine

If we were to think
of the illness and misfortune
of the people immediately around us
in our lives as something we had caused
knife-wounds we ourselves

had frequently inflicted it would be
overwhelming at first of course
truth slapping us awake
four hours late
for the emergency

but instead the blood is everywhere
on the walls which take it down
into the sixth earth layer of hell
where the bodies are hung in closets
no notes found.

Sandy Valentine

Early mosquitoes before
the morning wakes up
and the heat turns up
bliss sits down
on the slowly sunlit sand

blessings on the day
the luxury of even being able
to say it we
broken pieces of mica
are shattered into

the ways the shadows yield
pulling away from the will
of the world to stand
alone
as only a lover can.

Confused Valentine

Modernism is clinical depression
post-modernism is deranged depression
a normal reaction to an unfortunately
now normal variation on plangent
themes of madness

in my family everybody fought
with everybody so escape
got confused with peace
and rape with theft
but I refuse to be intimidated

by the present moment anymore
my goal in life
is to eliminate the egotism
of writing a poem
in the very act of writing it.

Freedom Valentine

Isn’t the heart still only a seed
shallowly planted in the body
which dies to feed it that
its first drink in the cold fire
be sweet and juicy

if to have and to relinquish the power
to enforce fictions
on oneself is freedom
to decay how deny
angels you haven’t seen

when history you haven’t either
the stage is small
the seed’s soliloquy
runs on
for pages and pages.

Flashing Valentine

What we require
at the tips of tendrils
where she sticks her eggs
one at a time
decorating the vine

so death’s built-in
not an add-on
the ancient altars
kitchens where
the gods were cooked

all we’ve been eating
she thinks are different
flashes of light
some pushing day
some pushing night.

Language Valentine

There is no message
from the mystery
of the I
no message
from no I

incorporating the incorruptibility
of the distraction of language
as part of three coming into being
out of one and then
four and six ‘re-marriages’

except number serves all forms
seeking to unionize
with every color now
but the colors of eyes will never erase
the color of surprise.

Not It Valentine

As in each morning
he hands you back
your heart not
invalidated openly
but crinkled and unsteady

and sends you back
for cross examination
excellent and exhaustive
doddering across streams and streets
as in life that hummingbird

but that’s not it
the spirit can’t be sick
the poem won’t just sit still
won’t symbolize a self
for itself real or fake.

White Sunday Valentine

Finally on Pentecost
my two cactus flowers
Shame and Fear
appeared
innocent provocative and pink

a serious red-pink
above untouchable stems
the stunning hush of blood
under skin a fire
in the walls of my house

the sound preceding
the heat the light
a whirling stillness
beauty used me
to incite.

Hardly, Valentine

had the man
suffered and

surrendered
enough

how not to love
himself at all

to eliminate
those pleasant errors

(not taken from him
but freely given)

for imagination’s sake
when in the end if not

I am the words
what use is poetry?

Love's Valentine

Already a day old
when it’s born so acute
if it looks to the left
without turning its head
it can flip through centuries.

Its poor ego always tidying-up
the leafy apartment of its purpose
a poem is a pet
even the caterpillar left
a scatter of small black seeds.

I’ve left a sandwich in the frig
and will see you in the morning
but love the conditions for peace
are harsh and interrogative
and won’t be voided.

Ghetto Valentine

How much time
should a poem get
a ghetto poem get
after the bell goes off
to run for the house
or maybe the alley

to run for its clucking life
as the guns come out
or maybe no fuck that shit
you turn and walk
right at it

not death but the
perpetrators of death
the spirits of darkness
who stop you and go
bitch whassup bitch?

Sinner's Valentine

I am a sinner
in the camps of saints
I am a messenger
of shadows and shames
do I want too much?

Let me not to the highest explain
I have been insane
as you lost my only one
as you died
more than three days ago.

As if this life alone
had truth and weight
this filigregious* light
his shadow once wrinkled
with blood and bone.


*filigregious – filigree plus egregious. Pass it on.

Elephantine Valentine

That little elephant in the middle
at the root of my body
wants out. No more sex.

The red eagle of my stomach
won’t be coming back.

In their seventh instar
the caterpillars of my limbs
are hanging chrysalides from sticks
a long walk
from where they lived.
I can’t wait.

And the hornet of my heart
in my sampler zodiac
you knew would sting you

what else could it do
with the sword I carried
but guard the poison-honey
only you would crave?

Ancient Basic Valentine

Fire = light + ash
or

light(Fire)ash
or

light
light(Fire)light
ash

The ash is the take-away

The light crosses over

The Fire is you

Two-face.

Isaiah's Valentine

Hairball control
when I’d prefer
deep compatibility
or the true cost
of the insects of North America.

Take the swallowtail culture
unfolding its triptych
how it focuses on chaos
and the technology
of beautiful lives.

But if you eat a seal’s raw heart
didn’t Isaiah say
aren’t you clarifying your will
to eat a human heart
as well?

Memorial Day Valentine

I gave my life
for a change
I thought it
would be nice for a change
it was

and now I look in the mirror
I can see my death
it doesn’t need a face-lift
it’s young and strong
and never leaves me

the more I know me
the less I love me
but someone must know
and love me for me
even to exist.

Memorial Valentine

Sometimes a leaf falls
curving into the basket
an avatar of leaves an example
of that fulcrum of disaster
which can right itself.

For the sake of all its lovers
itself at first Itself at length
with battered wings
It lays eggs as big
as molecules.

So I swept the patio
and watered everything
and sat and waited
while my heart was swept
and I was clean and new.

On Becoming A Percept Valentine

In fifty years
I’ve gathered
all things are beings
all beings are things
the widest ramifications.

That something is constantly
trying to occupy itself
the sweet dress of flesh
how to hold the edges
when I’m dying to see you.

But you just have to stare between
the beings to see the things
or listen behind the things
to really hear the beings
so why all this secrecy?

Ascension Valentine

I forgive myself
by forgiving you
except I don’t
forgive myself
I refuse

to lift myself
off the hook
thrown back to
build a better
you who won’t

be harvested again
last night’s rain
circling and circling
the yard
the sun.

Beach Valentine

More into the true
we must try to go
this our way of organizing
is too dependent
on things outside

to break free
is only a willingness to work on
on ourselves from the sensory
trace lure out the names
of our first friends

and the day we promised
ourselves something
promised to do some particular thing
as soon as we grew up
and could move to that place.

Museum Valentine

Between techno and porno
a butterfly’s wings
between pretty seductions
and power games
an ant’s sharp teeth

between the young face inside
and the old face outside
from me to me

between the sound of empty cocoons
in a shadow box saved
and a thin string of sinew
on which we’re played

between

that music
between.

Darkness Valentine

If I said anything
useful please use it
if I said anything
hurtful please
forgive it

We are all drowning
trying to save one another
even though we pretend
I never saw you before
in my life

What convinces me
of love remains when
we take the mask of memory
off and enter
that dark land.

Herod's Valentine

Now I await the arrival
of one new thought
having thought all
the other thoughts
or their place-holders

their relative em-
bodiments the young
archeologist’s pleasure
reassembling Herod’s
sarcophagus one of the

innocent boys
he butchered returned
in her smile she too
awaiting the arrival
of one new thought.

Cancer Train Valentine

Let’s say this orange is the sun
falling above the speckled
banana horizon so now
the world requires a new
kind of violent farming.

Is it when the cancer train
pulls into your extremely
productive backyard you’ll
go quietly to the doctor
lying about it for dignity’s sake?

To manage such offspring
ignorance must lie down with greed
the most natural outcome
but the least workable
for a human world.

Tenant's Valentine

We aren’t here
when the night cleaners
sweep through the empty
hallways of our sighing
swaying bodies

trying to put things back
in their places to restore
anonymity and calm
before the tenant returns
with shovel and hose

to resume the excavation
of someone buried alive inside
when no one was watching
already a small crowd of feelings
gathered around to applaud.

Next Valentine

Someone's yelling
at someone
too far away
for me to hear
anything more than
yelling sounds
bees scything
the silence
above me
how is it one
life turns into
the next inside
out if not
with a peculiar
gesture suddenly
one’s ‘whole being’
swims out to
the middle
of the sun.

Rose Valentine

Half of life
you follow the stem
it seems so abruptly
bent toward some
sword-like bud

After whose humiliation
the leaves go on alone
recouping piece by piece
all the old furniture
for a new flowering

And on the other half
you notice how just before
it turned into a flower again
it looked back at you like Orpheus
and grinned.

Flame Valentine

Butterfly shadows roaming
coupling among leaf shadows
light flows and smoke rises
the world eager as wax
to enter the flame

O right it’s already burning
orange butterfly on yellow
chrysanthemum the green
remembering to stand
upright in the flames

Now we’ve become strangers
we who were so sick at one
time but love had us tested
and found us guilty of still
wanting love all the time.

Ownership Valentine

How can I feel so wonderful
the microcosm of the world
but so far from what
I should be
when I look inside myself?

What or who
accounts for this gap
between sensual delight
and thinking alone which
cannot be all there is?

As if these thoughts were mine
that I had some ownership of the air
free to think anything and be wrong
with or without awareness
how it affects what’s true.

Palo Verde Valentine

When attention becomes attachment
becomes desire becomes despair
you know you’ve watered it enough
even if it doesn’t flower this year
you go on pruning.

A few yellow leaves
mistake your glance
for blooming
which says what about
your own bare branches?

But if you turn your head to the left
you can see the flame of stillness
burning in the silence
as if it had invented love
or was just about to.

Forest Valentine

Selective as morning and memory
must be for the grain to break
and spread through
chairs and capabilities
recalling the tree
itself a movie or a mood
of a heart or harbor
seen from moony porches
how could so much outside
not be even fuller inside
which must
have been here first
at the scene of its felling
those forest crashes sleeping
as I tiptoe in to you.

Greeting Valentine

Please leave
a message
after the tone
of my life
you will have
enough time
it turns out
to offer the tone
of yours
a machine
we say when it’s
really a god
who carries love
across.

Tearful Valentine

As if ahead of time
you knew someone’s doom
while they knew nothing
of its imminent arrival
no one could stop

shouting into the morning glory
you try to call him back
he knows you can see him
he knows nothing
more important

such morning tears
of a school boy
past my window
every morning now
for sixty years.

Kitchen Valentine

My crooked little kitchen
but you don’t really see it
the pain to get it perfect
more than the whole is clear
in the faint light of morning.

Homeless everything physical
gets put out there to fall apart
while everything not physical
like thought is permanent
and stays itself forever.

Thus our crooked lives
but you don’t really see them
wandering all over the map
going backward to go forward
or going forward to go forward.

Portrait Gallery Valentine

An immodest modesty
a loveless love.

A confident humility
a joyful sorrow
a grimaced wonder.

A long-entered withdrawal
a tolerable imploding.

A loving hate
a silent opera
a loud musing.

A dangerous caution
a wonderful mistake.

A minus genius
a feel for fate.

Three Sisters Valentine

Who else can I talk to
who else could I be talking to
love memory conscience
my three adopted sisters still
haunted by perfection?

Who else is listening
who else could I be listening to
this made-up fade-out
some dividend’s
extracted from?

Who else would know
who I am speaking to
still just renting this heart
and growing ever
deeper in your debt?

Colored Shadows Valentine

When I saw the colored hall
and stood inside and walked
among the woven hues
hundreds I’d never seen before
I wanted to cry for happiness

how the angel of each color
washed my head and body
and the pillars consoled me
their forgiving shelter
from the pure call of the dome

before I could lift my head
to look at I could
see within that mind
a picture of all the minds we’ve been
and wept.

May Day Valentine

That the world is a filthy place
that we may have killed it for good
that we become lethal to one another
that the cracked tower bell
rings fives times at nine o’clock

These incur capacities
accumulating lunar dust
which stirs when the bell
leaps up into the tower to see
what beauty’s up to

At this ungodly hour the faithful arrive
again at their abandoned shred
of truth and cling
to the power of clinging
which alone can save.

Pine Cone Valentine

Have you looked into the old books
on nature much I mean on your own
their pine cones are not
our pine cones their forests
of Phrygian helmets
an army of comically
virtuous shapes a symbol
of the penis and immortality
in those ancient states
of our youth
by virtue of their persistence
whether as erotic
or sublimated motif
even into today's designs.

Lotus Valentine

The one farthest out to sea
his life’s at stake and ugly
death is staring him in the face
but he brings none of them back
and no memory of the journey
on the low shelving sand
where they fall asleep
men like us perhaps
each a law to himself
a savage
deaf to justice
borne along by deadly winds
and each vomiting
chunks of human flesh
holding on singing until dawn
nobody’s killing me now.

Brook's Valentine

My blind love
can’t see my lover
this my Christ
you were trying
to tell me something
you didn’t want to have to.

That first cold mouthful
of happiness at being blood
reviving the brook
so it ran more burdened
more sure-footed.

What must have been there first
as memory to know
me false as leaf to you
as cloud to recognize
you true?

Betel's Valentine

Leaves are the only language I’ve got left
it’s a small mentally-enlarged yard
in a nation that has lost its name
in a brain that has lost
its capacity for scorn.

Finally the Greeks realized Apollo
and Dionysius were the same creature
but my fellow prisoners disdain
both equally in complete denial
of their own precarious position.

Sometimes they come so close
to my face I can hear
the __________ beating of their wings
orangeness singing
you’re up next.

Grackle's Valentine

A grackle came
and caught me
sitting by his birdbath
squawked and woke me
what becomes of what we love?

Awe for all my stumbling
rescues that only made
things better then worse
we have such ships set out
for one another at first.

But each answers
to an old lover inside
calling for his destruction
and will not settle
without a terrible brawl.

Valentine To Joe In Vietnam

Up the ruffled shirts
of the red pomegranate flowers
the sweet fingers
of the bees you know
what’s happening.

How we all want to germinate
in some imaginary country
that sounds like this language
in some faces so different
we may be lost again.

A sound I hear sometimes
sitting among the silences and
swoosh of passing planes and dogs
it could be an insect or a bird dying
or all that travels coming home to me.

Joyful Valentine

This morning I could really feel
the claptrap nature
of all physical reality
its angry persistence
in defiance of forgiveness.

Wasn’t this whole world
built on the simple idea of
darkness as the filling-in
of empty space with ash
and cement made

from our own bones
our own blood mixed in
the whole arranged so all
we could really own or take
is our own death into a new life?

Body's Valentine

What’s the matter
with mankind
no I mean really
is it matter or the means
of production the perceptions
where we get stuck-up
or give up refusing
letting ourselves be used
terrified to consider this
must have an opposite page
a wholly non-material way
of organizing work and love
that we here in the flesh
slowly build into our bodies
at some god’s request?

Winged Valentine

How far the caterpillar
ponders and saves
her money and must
have those wings
those Lucifer wings.

One parked her Holy Ghost self
right next to where the door
closes as if throwing
it in my face
here watch this stupid.

First you make a shriveled
leaf of yourself
younger and younger inside
older and older outside
then the wings are flown in.

Singing Valentine

When I
when will I
get past
these pictures
of things?

Every word
is an island floating
every human
an ocean
you sang like an ocean.

Or like a woman trapped
in a bad marriage
to a live oak tree
on some soul level
enchanted into me.

Roses Valentine

How to tell these roses
they won’t make it
what
were they thinking
with that red abyss?

Is risking
everything at once
the whole thing given
how violet
acknowledges

the loss?
I must ask you
not to tell them
yet
these roses.

Critical Valentine

A showoffiness somehow
unsuccessfully achieved
by a too-obviousness
not the scornful nihilism of say
Beckett’s failed Christianism (good)

great wrong-track mocker
(not so) excuse the tangent/
tantrum as if you were suddenly
to go deaf while everything
you say leaps forward

out of that absolute silence
the last wild animals
of our senses about
to devour us
again.

On The Fringe Valentine

Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Walker
follows a woman on the fringe
(not the fridge) played by
Emmanuelle Seigner it’s 1987
and we are in desperate trouble
having just met the white lady
and been dangled from the roof
but it’s Emmanuelle I miss
the Paris hotel and Dede Martin
who picked up the wrong suitcase
merde we must leave here
we must kiss and leave here
they treated her like a whore
but then she was playing one
take your fingers out of your mouth
do you want your wife back or not
everything will be just fine for you
for Emmanuelle and your wife
just fine for everyone thank you
except for Dede Martin and me.

Armantrout Valentine

Something winks at your way of deceiving me
a single eye opening in that succulent’s knees
sitting across from me nonchalantly.

As just the acute symptoms those orange lips
tend to be overmedicated and there’s something
wavering and cold about the wings.

But it’s a just a seam until it opens briefly trembles
a little rip in the skin of appearances
six sunsets backed up at a toll-booth.

Really I had no idea I was descending into dreams
so filled with the feeling “I am here”
and no separation anxiety at all!

Human Valentine

In this our human time
having once been rubies
asparagus and dragons
having learned to think of others
if not how to love them yet.

You were always my password
what identity could they steal
or should I ask which we were
so many crowded into
one small soul.

Until you arrived
thin cloud of sunlight
thinking yourself up
a new language
for reviving the dead.

Envious Valentine

The rose spines
won’t compost
with the other
trivial wastes
of time.

The agave thorns
beat their bitterness out
on no one
but themselves
achieving the peaks.

Purely for the prick
of emptiness they offer
is it possible for them
to show up at all
at the very birth of nothing.

Faithful Valentine

Even after my ninth repentance
was finally accepted
and the tenth and the eleventh
and help had come and clarity
I still wanted things my way.

My freedom and my lord
whoever he is I said
but when I called out for you
you were gone
other heart.

When I wasn’t using this one
for my thirteenth repentance
when I wasn’t uttering
another song of praise
for your safe return.

Panic Valentine

I had a panic attack in reverse
I couldn’t get enough of the outside
I kept craving more and more
of the outside until I was
completely outside myself.

A pond flopping about
pretending it isn’t caught
and someone running in the trees
past the winter lepers
undergoing their cures.

And filling in the bruises
someone running back
and forth covered with houses
bridges and dead traffic
like a brave in the woods.

Empty Valentine

The empty space
I occupy
in the world
of my skin
one tiny space.

I think this side
of death we have
only half our life
and on the other side
the waking half.

Heroic ambiguity
alive in two worlds
no longer on speaking
terms with one another
O mother O father.

Streaming Valentine

Whenever we meet here
in the land of the dead
or in flights of dreams
why is it always raining
or snowing like crocuses?

And why are you always
wearing that bloody shirt
which relaxes into
the background like fog
before my very blue?

One stream walks down
through difficult mountains
the other goes out and up
part of the hidden fire
in the darkness around us.

Moaning Valentine

What sounds like voices
just outside the door
but when I go to
listen it’s doves
mourning something.

Try not to cry
I try to tell them
but soon we’re both
broken down it’s a concerto
of tears and sobbing.

But you know it’s not about sorrow
at all that’s just the doorway
into some serious
not to say solemn serenading
as I moan on.

Easter Monday Valentine

Considered as light
considerate as light can be
don’t forget at all points
along the parade route
beings stand watching.

Witnesses to the witnesses
the entire future preserved
in the memory of one morning
lived over and over
all possible ways.

Morning being the morning
after the morning
as of someone in prison
who is freed this morning
as morning is.

Easter Valentine

Once I took a lover
when I was too old
for it to last past a few
late night dinners.

The evil twins of
the twelve hierarchies
always hovering nearby.

This Easter I look up to see
a cloud imitating a white poodle
just like Faust said he did
amusing and sad spirit
nostalgic for the flesh.

As if by getting older
you get over it
you don’t is the point
you bear the scars if it’s love
all over your body.

Holy Saturday Valentine

Let each man be his own religion
reverence openly her own true gods
or those things in the masks whatever
is feared as greater
to be so honored.

Reading and hearing
about their oddly familiar
stations his reenactment
of what can’t be reenacted
yet blooms as red roses.

Now the vine
every leaf eaten
its skin peeled away
veins just emptied
offers you its heart.

Maundy Valentine

Wolfram mentions three
journeys in the soul’s direction
pleasure first then the fruit
of pleasure which is doubt
then blessedness somehow.

An invisible plane gleams
for a moment then dissolves
back into your milky blue face
a cool breeze
washes my feet.

So the question begs how
to bring the body back
from the dead
shorn of all residue
save love.

Your Valentine

This year’s pomegranate tree
so many more red flowers
I’ve already forgotten when
bricked in by books piled high
unprepared to blossom.

Left to my own devices
I can as yet do little
for myself but notice
like a river inside me
what I see is you.

Here in the word I wait sitting
without an appointment
barely certain
I’d remember my name
if you asked.

Flayed Valentine

In order to enjoin again
this swoon of butterflies
every day in my yard I’m forced
to watch the flaying
inch by inch of my passion
vine with all its zany
pin-wheel flowers
white and purple
who thinks of this
but finally the caterpillars
play it inescapably sad
and sincere
like a last lover
devouring you
in a city of murderers.

Second Valentine

The second flowering
is smaller than the first
so much more intense
I mean intent intended
I was standing in the kitchen.

Stranded here because
of their refusals a gold
and red and purple
by the door gathering
homeless spirits around them.

Darkness is a fly
I invited to dinner
and if on my back
I lift more god than I
can be let me flower here again.

Dionysian Mystery Valentine

Light that is not quite light
darkness that is not quite
pitch black enough

cosmic fog
and human fog

as each butterfly is hatched
it joins the others madly
partying in my backyard

now there are sixteen
I swear all mad to mate
to go right back through
that tunnel

from the lowest
excrement up
to the sacrament
each is.

Comfortable Valentine

The comfortable cages
of the earth
aren’t even natural
for us loiterers
lingerers

everyone hates
a snitch but don’t
say nothing
when you could
have had it all

the thing about
Judas man
he just wasn’t
there yet still
afraid of life.

Margaret's Valentine

Many bees working today Sunday
the pomegranate flowers much
tunneling and back and
forth traveling to a bivouac
under the eaves

my eaves I feel grateful
they’ve appropriated
if it help them save
themselves from us
is this not a suicide face

the head on a Roman coin
or on the other hand
the skilled saw voices
of another world
those hinges

electric keening
the door
in a horror dream
wrestling with itself
at the last second to open.

Otter's Valentine

Is it the bright otter moon
leaping between the blue
flying clouds its half-
surfacing head in white
water driven from rock
to rock makes me
want to lie down and watch
in this wet grass in
the middle of the night
they might still come
for me the angels
of my youth or is it
you yourself moon
stern coffin of Osiris
Lord of forms
first picture of first word
already flown
from my mouth?

Beast's Valentine

In among the orange
nasturtiums a royal vein
of dark red velvet runs
but hardly any yellows
I think of my sins
as children growing up
slowly through ancient
losses to be loved back
in time
but some of my faults
of twenty years
standing and walking
just yesterday right
out the door
I never felt
so lonely loved.

Ego's Valentine

When I rotate
myself around
the twelve cities
of the broken sun
I see I would
have to be inside
the sun to
do that I would
have to be the sun
itself to do that
if not the long
lines of the
obvious world
would have to end
in darkness again.

Sounion Valentine

On that hillside
above the harbor

of Sounion
near the Temple of Poseidon

now just a marble skeleton
in those sacred precincts

where we talked and talked
loved one another why remake

the whippoorwill
if the forest is gone

once inside time
it will never end

then it will
just want to start up again

in any flower there’s
the whole geology of human feeling

moving in a clockwise way
as a star or as a scent.

Spring Light Valentine

To reverse the plains
of memory to their native colors
and run for the hills
when the light of spring
it cometh.

Aquamarine jonquils
and yellow Scilla
the sexual so strong we’re
hard to know what’s
on purpose.

To turn up the palms
of history and read the secret
words given and taken away
so thoroughly interwoven
we comes back to one.

Long Marriage Valentine

Suddenly after years
of never thinking about you
you show up that stinging
in the throat my eyes
combing you.

Is it the dog’s mournful barking
makes it colder tonight
how love is fear
to reverence so itself
in overcoming fear.

As if to think so
were two molecules
animating themselves
each so sure he’ll leave you
you help him pack.

Duemer's Valentine

I think maybe what the poet’s
getting at has more to do
with the larynx sometimes

than the heart at least
as far as I’ve been able to tell
when I assume the position

not to say the blue mantle
of my Irish grandfather
a great sentimentalist and

talented sensualist with nine
children to my one
I think there are always at least two

or more worlds at any given point
all undergoing mitosis in the true
poet’s heart and throat.