February 14, 2012

The ships in the channel are bellowing through the fog like prehistoric beasts, calling to each other, only this is no mating call, as the day might imply.  This is the call of warning, the call to avoid touching, to avoid that collision that would wreck them beyond repair, and empty them into the bay.  In the blankness of air there is danger, in the foggy blindness these dangers are moving like shadows, like silhouettes behind a curtain, nothing recognizable, even the familiar strange and exotic.  The bare trees more skeletal in the half light, bony branches, weird lights, the grass grayed over, no one out who does not have to be, even the birds quiet and puffed up against the dampness.

It is Valentine's Day, and it seems there are more bad poems written about love than about any other topic.  Searching though them is often . . . enlightening and hilarious at the same time.  None seems to fit just right, mostly they just seem too idealistic and sappy to be about anything real.  After much searching, this one seems to say something about arriving at love that resonates with what I see of love around me . . .

Into Arrival

It will be in a station
with a glass roof
grimy with the soot
of every train and
they will embrace for every mile
of arrival. They will not
let go, not all the long way,
his arm in the curve of her longing. Walking in a city
neither knows too well,
watching women with satchels
giving coins to a priest for the war veterans;
finding the keyhole view of the church
from an old wall across the city, the dome
filling the keyhole precisely,
like an eye. In the home
of winter, under an earth
of blankets, he warms her skin
as she climbs in from the air.

There is a way our bodies
are not our own, and when he finds her
there is room at last
for everyone they love,
the place he finds,
she finds, each word of skin
a decision.

There is earth
that never leaves your hands,
rain that never leaves
your bones. Words so old they are broken
from us, because they can only be
broken. They will not
let go, because some love
is broken from love,
like stones
from stone,
rain from rain,
like the sea
from the sea.

Ann Michaels

They will embrace and not let go, even when they have to be apart, he will warm her as she climbs in from the air, as in my experience men are furnaces, and women are the ones with cold hands and cold feet and the deep need to be warmed.   There is room at last for everyone they love, because once you have discovered that love that grounds you, there is always room for more of it, more from every place and person in your life.  In some recognition of that deep love, you come to know what other lovers know, the growing earth, the daily decisions that deepen that love, the joy in even rainy days, the sea a reflection of how deep you are to each other and by finding that depth you find it for the world.  This is more about the effects of love, how deep it goes, and what it means to arrive at it every day, than most of the poems that only seem to make romance out of something much more integral, out of something essential that has become that shelter from which it is possible to know more about everything.

Happy Valentine's Day!  A day not just for the celebration of romantic love, but for all the love we share, love for the lover, and everyone else, for the wonder of the world, even fog bound and gray, for arriving each morning at that place where love in us lives.