Mid-Year Valentine

Living as a fugitive
From one’s true life
As we often feel
 
Immensely insignificant
And yet the missing link
That holds it all together
 
At least as far as we’re concerned
Having a beer with you
And it’s summer-in-winter
 
One of those crazy days
When the cold air falls back
And lets the sun in
 
And the ice of yesteryear
Melts on the porch where we sit
Basking in the first warm day 

 

Caught Valentine

Don’t people in heaven
Synchronize their watches
Before they come down to bodies again
 
So they will recognize
A familiar face
However unconsciously
 
And be caught up short
So thoroughly seen
By a stranger
 
Who could be Christ or anyone
Everyone is so unique
Each his own species
 
But when I look at you
I don’t see myself
But someone better

More Valentine

Completely craven with regard
To the disapproval of others
In the beginning was the shameless
 
But I grew to dislike myself
Enough to want to leave me
A mouse in a trap
 
Of my own mistaking
Which finally released me
To even greater misperceptions
 
Awkward at love-making
Always daunted
By a further passion
 
If I held you
It was only
To hold you more

Feast of the Innocents Valentine

I looked up to see the cat
But it was just a cinder moon
Rising from a smoke stack
 
I’d just read Hirschfield’s poem’s last line
‘Calling her children to come in from a day
Whose losses as yet remain child-sized’
 
When right below it I find ‘The sublimated
Forces of sex, love, money and class
Converged upon a little girl’s flesh’
 
In an article about another little girl
Who grew up in Morocco
‘In an art-filled house’
 
‘Just another species of animal’
With animal-sized losses
Following the children in

Holy Innocents Valentine

Mars in Gemini the accountant
Who fights with himself
When love has paid all our debts
 
But still I run the balance up
Who argues all day with himself
The one and the zero
 
Love adds up his taxes
The one who relaxes
The zero who faints
 
A muddle of gains and losses
I turn back to the trees
Where money grows into crosses
 
To Gemini who drops all his leaves
And stands in the winter sun
Impoverished and crowned

Unknown/Solstice Valentine

I wanted to rake the leaves before I left
But an icy wind had other plans
We wrestled in the yard a sight
 
He took his share of bushels home
Somewhere he couldn’t explain
Even after so much whirling
 
I almost went with him
Letting go of the decision
The way love starts
 
And you’re swept along
For the pure joy
Of the inward flight
 
Airborne with the leaves
Out over other people’s yards
And down the long streets of night

Stumbling Valentine

I’m still a little leery
Of my style and step
I’m still a little sticky
 
On the uptick and slow
In the down-flow
I waver warily
 
Cautious of injury
Given if received
Given and received
 
I walk out on the future often
But then stealthily turn back
Losing my way
 
I am here and there
The earth pulling me in
The sun remembering me

Wintry Valentine

A boy is dying in the middle of the street
Cars drive by but no one stops or comes
Of course it’s Christmas
 
Another haiku no one reads
Another beautiful terrible winter
I hear in static on the phone
 
Behind my brother’s voice
He says it’s crashing at his windows
Thuds of flakes and clattering ice
 
While I sit where it’s nice
And quiet and the sun shines
And yet it’s still Christmas
 
Or whatever you want to call it
When the sun lies down
To give birth to itself again

Religious Valentine

Did you hear
Another religion
Is dying
 
Does that cheer you
Or bring you fear
The end is drawing near
 
The bodhisattva says
He won’t reincarnate again
Though the government orders it
 
Having first destroyed
All the monasteries and temples
Swept away the old gods
 
Except for the few we rescued
Smuggled over safely
From a prior destruction

Fallen Valentine

Some plants speak to me
But with them all I feel
An immediate kinship
 
They all say the same thing
Stay a leaf forever
It’s easier
 
Worse than sentimental
Are the coy and clever
Which leaves never are
 
Then they go on and on
About spring and the sickness
Before childbirth
 
That this is the only world
They can leave their children
When they all fall down

Here Valentine

Will still rules the world
Feeling’s not far behind
But thinking’s still
 
Bringing up the rear
Yet how else did we get here
But a thought following a thought
 
Between the Scylla of fact
And the Charybdis of truth
Too young for this life
 
To be time’s creature
The perpetrator
The redeemer
 
Still thinking of a way
Out of this mess
We’ve created

 

 

Later Valentine (for Joan)

Vast archangels of the zodiac
With your swinging scales
Bestowing and cajoling us
 
We sail far past you
Out to the dark pastures
Where light is born
 
Where we are the dew
Of the first morning
Proud as if we created it
 
When you misread the text
Saying ‘Moses could only see
God’s behind’
 
Crashing us back to earth
With laughter
We saved for later

Worked Valentine

You worked for it
Whatever it is
You worked hard
 
Even the devil deserves
Credit for that
Didn’t Job forgive Yahweh
 
In the end
I’ve forgotten
How it turned out
 
Incomprehensible suffering
I remember as a result
Of some longstanding desire
 
To be loved as if
It wasn’t already so
Or already enough

New Valentine

Isn’t the point of language
To come to the first word
And to receive it
 
In your new mouth
The bread and stone of it
You dissolve in saying it
 
Over and over
As the name for all things
Loved and unloved

And years later

You’re still looking for it
A god’s name or a friend’s
 
That first word
On which everything
Else depends

Sleeping Valentine

What I see at the threshold
Is a young woman holding a child
How could she be so bold
 
As if offering it to me wavering
Trying to picture what she sees in me
That love is the same in both worlds
 
Assuming its infant form
The original cupid reborn
Flying about the room
 
Not at all the nativity I planned
The marching band
The palms waving and laid on the road
 
But the holiness of the world
Sleeping
In my hands

Right Valentine

I build an inner and an outer edifice
One that crumbles as I patch it up
And one I patch as it tumbles down
 
They stand two castles
Over a valley of vineyards
The way life stands between two deaths
 
Rescued by memory’s one light
Battery fading but still
Blinding clarity of the stones
 
How did I lay them so huge
And snug you couldn’t slide
My soul between them
 
But still they toppled
And still I call you priests and knights
Childhood was right

Rocky Valentine

Only the heavy tide of the senses
Which washes in on us
And then in sleep draws back
 
Uncovering the rocky shore
Of its hidden life
Open for exploration
 
What from the great sea
We have brought back
From the stand-still of thought
 
Pools of sea urchins
And stranded clams
Closing like eyes
 
In the shadowy light of another sun
The inner cries
Of a thousand gulls

Forgiven Valentine

Isn’t the birth of a child
The true big bang
At whatever level it happens
 
Everything remembered starts over
As with the first love
When someone else is more important
 
And the father’s a little terrified
And the mother a little dazed
And the helplessness begins
 
With the first sad cries
And happiness seems possible
On the earth again
 
Forgiveness flourishes
Like a little bud
In the crib

School’s Valentine

How to reunite and gather up
The trillion pieces of the one I
Now that we’ve become ourselves
 
In what are we united
If not in mutual knowledge
That many things are hidden
 
And that no one knows
What new revelation
Will sweep upon us

The school of wonder
In which we are still
Nervous children
 
The maintenance
Of reverence
In our eyes

Gates Valentine

Keeping the passage open
Between here and the gate
Where a train waits
 
Ain’t waitin’ for no bus
Or lumbers past
Bodies sleeping in the streets
 
Train that is itself a derelict
Speed that is itself narcotic
Love that is itself platonic
 
Train of woes and new equipment
I don’t see you in your tattooed glory
But I hear you saunter past
 
My unencumbered gate
Keep going I can wait
Till the world comes round again