5 Poems About Love

I think love happens better on any other day besides Valentine’s Day—that date we are commanded to be charming and develop a fondness for each other. Love me on a Thursday when I have a cold and we’re out of milk and you have a deadline at work. That’s something I want to know about. But I’m a poet, and poetry is supposed to woo people. It does woo people, if not inspire them. So here are five poems about love, in all its breakable forms. Yes, five. Take your time. It’s just poetry, not a different language, and I promise it will feel better inside you than that spreadsheet or shopping list you’re looking at.

Also, it’s ok to cry if you want. Valentine’s Day has been overrun with cartoon hearts, but let’s remember St. Valentine. That guy officiated weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry, and the day we all pass around chocolate was the day he was martyred. So you can keep the 12 perfectly-shaped candies—tell me something reckless from your bones.

Valentine’s Day

There is enough hate in my hometown
to kill two policemen in one day.

I sit at a coffee bar with my face to the window
and stare out at a single glove on the asphalt.

As I drive home I count the half-raised flags—
I don’t have to tell you what the red lines are like.

Back roads have always been for the heartbroken.
I pass a disintegrating animal, pink with its insides

and later, the top, bottom, and contents
of a heart-shaped, velvet candy box.

I wonder which fate awaits me
and if I’ll feel surprised when I get there.

Your car is golden in the halfway light
waiting resolutely outside your workplace door.

I wish it was August, that blistering month we crave
that vanishes in the night and leaves us as cold as diamonds.

Prairie

I have not yet been able to express it,
the feeling that this is, perhaps,
a great coincidence into which we fell
with interchanging tact and hesitation.

It is like one of those afternoons
which is both overcast and full of glare,
my shadow appearing and vanishing
leaving me alone with one tree
yet vastly outnumbered by its leaves.

I have been secretive to an indecent degree,
laying my passion out for you like a tea tray,
everything placed for your enjoyment
breakable and lovely
when it is actually so abundant
I doubt even Eden could sustain its wild verdancy.

Blockage

I tired of feeling
for both of us.

Keats wasn’t helping.
Browning was making it worse.

And this:
The heart wants what the heart wants—
or else it does not care.

Thank you, Emily.

I needed a diagram.
Science.

I smoothed my hands
over the glossy pages
everything labeled, named, sorted.

Staring into the heart’s anatomy
I found you.

The book tells me
atrium means entrance.
That’s how you got in.

The pulmonary trunk
sends blood to my lungs,
the aorta sends blood
to the rest of me.

What the picture doesn’t show
is where, exactly, you are.

Which is frustrating,
because I can feel you
leaning against the wall
taking up a great deal of space
with your practiced frame
ammunition
apathy.

Lessons

The way I love you
Is like the first time I encountered the word
Rendezvous
How it came out terribly wrong
My mother helping me to understand
And then a lifetime of admiration
For its strange beauty
No matter how deceptive.

Love

Bread is a process
a science experiment
an asking other people how it’s done

Waiting for chemistry
hoping for life

It is punching everything down
deflation of ego
and starting again

It is working it out
with your hands
shaping it into equal loaves
or trying to

Heat helps
and time
patience is inevitable
forgetfulness unendurable

And then the eating
however you like

Bread is a chosen thing

The best test of success perhaps
whether brought to the table with care
to be shared with friends
or broken without thanksgiving
for the crows to find
when they come home