Valentine's Day

Here it comes again, our high holiday to be observed with reverence, devotion and worth-ship. Yes, yes I know how Hallmark has purloined it, how it has been commodified into roses and chocolate hearts. Nothing wrong with all that, say I. Why not set aside a day for loving out loud?

To add to the joy we are thankfully spared any parades, piety or political posturing for the occasion. It isn’t even a union holiday yet it is all about union, that joyful meet, a celebration of our sublime accident, this soufflé ever rising.

Peggy and I will play one of our favorite games, called Rich. We find a restaurant (we can’t afford) with white tablecloth and candles overlooking some rolling hills, ocean view … real or imagined. We exchange poems, get a little tipsy and share our amaze. How I won the human lottery. How our tangled roads converged, confirmed that first month when we gave each other the same book, a novel by Wendell Berry called, A Place on Earth. Since then we offer each other priceless gifts such as a gnarled tree stump, an avenue of acacia in bloom, hemorrhagic sunsets, violin-shaped like clouds, and pods nurtured to bursting.

Our first book was a collection of answering poems called, Letters to the Same Address, published by Momentum Press. In those early days we also each wrote a word-of-the-day which, strung together, became a sort of poem or at least an indecipherable chronicle of our inner lives.

Oh what fun it is growing old together, losing height, gaining distance. Shriveled here and there yet still juiced and more merged in a further dimension of intimacy.

Of course after 35 years together we have a large album of reminisced coves, caves and calving glaciers but we like to stay in the elongated now or look ahead for birds of paradise to be laying orange eggs while mocking birds, nesting in my shoe left in the patio, sing hosannas as the wild fern overthrows the garden wall.

In Peggy’s world the bases are always loaded with nobody out. Time is running counter-clockwise, under this spell, this spin we’re in, sliding home in a cloud of dusty petals, a minyan of two in a sacred riddle unsolved, unmapped, unsayable, and yet…