Happy Valentine’s Day and an upcoming reading with Martha Silano in Redmond
Happy Valentine’s Day out there! Today is a day for exuberance. For chocolates and flowers and celebration! I used to love getting Valentines in that little cardboard box in grade school…and later in junior high and high school, at my school you could buy pink and red carnations and have them sent to someone’s locker and someone always left me one anonymously each year, and I never found out who, but the mystery of it cheered me up! So today, give someone something unexpected. Leave a bigger tip, give them a kiss on the cheek, stay on the phone a little longer than usual. Show yourself more love too.
Glenn made me pink marshmallow hearts dipped in dark chocolate for Valentine’s Day. Gluten-free and delicious! He gets an “A.” And, after getting stuck with needles at the allergist’s all day yesterday, I think I deserve a day of fun, so we are going to see that new meaningless-yet-fun looking movie with Reese Witherspoon and spies.
To honor the day, here’s one of my favorite love poems, by Robert Graves, short but perfect:
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
And now, make sure you mark on your calendars – I’m reading with Martha Silano in two days at Soul Food Books in Redmond! 7 PM February 16th, Soul Food Books. Be there!
Happy Valentine’s Day – News and Love Poems
Happy Valentine’s Day!
First of all, you may have already read about Eduardo C. Corral’s good news – he has won the Yale Younger Poets Prize! I’ve been admiring Eduardo’s poetry since I discovered his blog in 2005, so I felt really happy about this. A great Valentine!
A nice shout-out from one of my mythology heroines, artist and writer Terri Windling, here.
I was honored to be nominated not once, but twice, for something called a Memetastic Blog Award, once by Marie Gauthier and the other time by Kristin Berkey-Abbott. (I will post more fully on this later, but wanted to thank them both for the nomination!
Two love poems from my new book, She Returns to the Floating World (due out in July from Kitsune Books!)
Love Story (with Fire Demon and Tengu)
Maybe in this version you are a bird, and I have become an old woman. Maybe you ate a falling star. It’s hard to love someone in a castle—they always feel distant. I will open a flower shop and learn to speak German, take to wearing ruffled dresses and straw hats. You’d like to pin me down, but you could tell my feet weren’t touching the ground. I called your name over and over, but you couldn’t hear me above the din of the bombers. It was like movies of wartime Japan. I looked up and there were planes bulging with smoke.
The blue sky kept getting darker –
sometimes, I thought,
with your shadow.
In the end, I have a dog in my arms and a scarecrow for a friend, but I never make it to Kansas. The field is wet and stormy, I kiss three men goodnight for their magic. The door to your childhood is opening for me. It allows me passage into a brick wall, my fists full of shiny black feathers, the shell of an egg, the howl of cold wind against a mountain. Don’t worry, your heart is in good hands. Let me keep it a little longer; its blue glow illuminates everything.
The thick knife gleams under your strong hands,
slicing carrot, onion, garlic, pepper,
scattering slivers into the air,
staining your fingers with their gold juices.
You chop so quickly the definite line
between “hand” and “knife” dissolves.
You strew pieces into the skillet,
listen for the right sting and sizzle of oil and wine,
waiting to feed me the work of your hands,
that broken finger, the tiny cuts
that lace and scar your surfaces.
Love Poems in Honor of Valentine’s Day
I don’t write a heck of a lot of love poetry, but here are three – all dedicated to my sweet husband G.
From The Bedside Guide to the No Tell Motel anthology
After Ten Years Together, We Sneak Off to Make Out in Someone’s Closet
Snuffling, bumping elbows against mops,
hitting our knees at awkward angles,
I squeeze the beeswax candle on accident
instead of you, and you hit your head
on a box of matches, scattering sparks
around us in the dark as we breathe
sweat and dust and the now-familiar soapy taste
of our skins, here amid fly swatters, empty
milk bottles, your back pink and smooth with its knots
of muscle like pulled taffy under my fingertips.
Two blind naked mole rats reaching
closer after ten years of marriage, trying to find
the magnets within us under clavicle, scapula,
hip bone, sternum, that repel and attract us,
the volcanic fissures that separate me from you.
From Rattle’s Summer 2008 issue
Advice Given to Me Before my Wedding: A Pseudo-Ghazal
Better to be the lover than the beloved, you’ll have passion.
Better to be the beloved, a sure thing, a lifetime of that.
He is more beautiful but you,
you have more power. Which is to say,
you are just like your brother. Lift your eyes
and people do what you say. Who knows why.
Men are like breakfast cereal. You have to pick one.
Fish in the sea, a dime a dozen. They are singing for you, now.
Keep your own bank account. Keep working.
Give him a blow job, and he’ll volunteer to take out the trash.
You are mine, says the beloved, and I am yours.
Whither you go I will go. Honey and milk are under her tongue.
Cancer and Taurus, very compatible.
You’re the hard-charger, he’s the homemaker.
Don’t stop wearing lipstick. Don’t put on any weight.
Don’t buy the dress too soon. If you go on the pill, your breasts will swell.
One day you might regret. You might do better.
You could do worse. One man’s as good as another.
Wear my old pearls. Here’s the blue, a handkerchief embroidered with tears.
If you won’t wear heels, you’ll look short in the pictures.
If you don’t wear a veil, people will say you’re not a virgin.
Good luck, glad tidings, a teddie, a toaster. So long, farewell.
From Ninth Letter’s Fall/Winter 2008 issue (still available on newsstands now!)
Married Life
You sing in your sleep, he told her.
He rubs her stomach counter-clockwise.
Everyone says I’m lucky she says
to have you.
She washes his hair with lemon and chamomile
to make it more golden.
He chops vegetables on a wooden tablet he made himself.
She thinks she ought to be better with her hands.
You make my life easier she tells him.
I curse like a sailor since I met you he says.
Buyer’s remorse? An empty cradle,
a woman sharper and shorter-haired than he’d married.
They break things made with care,
watch a pair of otters in the river
twisting and grooming and biting.
They look like they’re trying to drown each other.
What do I sing? She asks him.
I don’t know. I can’t understand the words.
Snatches of song like you’re underwater.
Sometimes, it sounds like you’re laughing.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Still recovering from the flu here, but thought I would share one of my favorite ever love poems. A great, great last line here, I think. And anyone who knows me well knows why this poem might be close to my heart. (Another favorite: e.e. cumming’s “somewhere I have never travelled.”)
Love Poem
By John Frederick Nims
My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing
Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.
Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers’ terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.
A wrench in clocks and the solar system.
Only with words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.
Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love’s unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.
Be with me, darling, early and late.
Smash glasses—I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.
