I’m writing this on Valentine’s Day 2016, at a sunny table outside Cole St cafe in The Haight, 6000 miles away from The Hub.
He is in London, I am in San Francisco. But love is what the scientists call non-local and no problem for it to leap continent and ocean.
He got me a card, I've sent him a poem.
The commercial side of Valentine’s day debases and dilutes love, with its cupids and chocolates, completely overlooking how love is a force that destroys the established order, over and again, even in a long relationship.
(30+ years, since you ask.).
That's what I wanted to try to capture in this poem, and it seems to me far more significant than any physical separation on a particular day.
As with all love poetry, though addressed to a person, you can substitute the creative force of life itself as the love object.
Happy Valentine's day!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
For Philip
Valentine's Day 2016
I think on days like this a poet
must speak. Of how love can melt
the earth until it boils, yes
mountains and all, like water;
can call the sun and the stars out
of their orbits, can crack the sky
open and cause it to fall, drops of night
in black, and day in blue, falling,
falling, like rain pouring.
Fall and melt, oh yes, I
remember! Boil and pour.
They say love will save us in the end.
So it sometimes seems. Who knows? I
can only say: when all is said
and done, what matters most
is how, love having swirled in here
and surged between us, we,
through all our years together,
mostly matched its soar.
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