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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