Valentine

Paul Carroll

Our matchbox bedroom in the loft above your

sculpture factory

Turns magical at times

Behind its dark blue Druid door. Last night,

Inside you, sweetheart,

It felt as if I were coming from the soul itself.

And that indian summer Sunday afternoon a year

ago

When the bed became a meadow

Of purple thistles, the honey hidden at the bottom

of the stem

Farm kids know to find

For the sweetest suck of all.

And sometimes in the winter when the room turns

into a Cornell box

Filled with the everyday miracles—

Soap bubble pipe and thimble, wooden rabbits

And old tan magazine illustrations of the Zodiac.

Or turns into an igloo in which the only place to

Is to burrow here below the yellow blanket and

the pillows

To the South Pacific

Of ourselves. And then those mornings on

vacation

Gentle as the feathers of a light spring rain, and

at the same time hard, like the beak

Of a hawk. You are where I belong.

Rating:

Comment form:

I knew too that through them I knew too that he was through, I knew too that he threw them. I knew too that they were through, I knew too I knew too, I knew I knew them. I knew to them. If they tear a hunter through, if they tear through a hunter, if they tear through a hunt and a hunter, if they tear through different sizes of the six, the different sizes of the six which are these, a woman with a white package under one arm and a black package under the other arm and dressed in brown with a white blouse, the second Saint Joseph the third a hunter in a blue coat and black garters and a plaid cap, a fourth a knife grinder who is full faced and a very little woman with black hair and a yellow hat and an excellently smiling appropriate soldier. All these as you please. In the meantime examples of the same lily. In this way please have you rung.
WHAT DO I SEE? A very little snail. A medium sized turkey.

Read Poem

138

Rating:

Valentine To RR Written Extempore Feb. 14 1802 by Charlotte Richardson

Custom, whose laws we all allow,
And bow before his shrine,
Has so ordained, my friend, that you
Are now my Valentine.

Ah, could my humble Muse aspire
To catch the flame divine!
These are the gifts that I’d require

Read Poem

103

Rating:

Valentine, Valentine by Landis Everson

Valentine, valentine you arrive
in a town car with a chauffered envelope,
scattered pieces of you enrolled in schoolyards
like a recess of paper vanity, litter, old
with red-rimmed "loves," red-rhymed lies in lace.

The verses come, rising as easily as long-stemmed snakes in
bloom where swamps settle down and drowse
by dawn, a night of secrets slid out of drawers like knives nesting, a choice of chimes and slums overrun
by bejeweled heartbreakers. What a lovely
winter, almost skipping February.

Read Poem

106

Rating:

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Part I by Ezra Pound

(Life and Contacts)

“Vocat aestus in umbram”
Nemesianus Ec. IV. E. P. ODE POUR L’ÉLECTION DE SON SÉPULCHRE

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art

Read Poem

127

Rating:

What's Wrong by Landis Everson

"What you are struggling with," said
the psychologist, "is
a continuous song, something like
a telephone's tone. Nebulous, noncommittal,
unrelenting, pretending
to give you messages it can't deliver.

Because the body is unattached. It is,"
he said, "like a valentine sent
out cold, beautiful, brittle as tomorrow's
deja-vu, but distortedly misaddressed.
These pills will help you
find yourself
somewhere where the lace ends up loose
and the paste is still humming

Read Poem

114

Rating:

Comment form:

Similar Poems: