(Valent)lines

Recently, Peter Cole and Forrest Gander gave a reading at McNally Jackson.  I was particularly struck by how Cole’s poetry was infused with the more ornate language of medieval Hebrew which Cole translates into fluid and musical English.  For Valentine’s Day, I can’t think of a better love poem, one that considers love in a thoughtful manner of the everday, than this poem:

(Valent)lines for A.

What law and power has blessed me so

that in this provocation of flesh

I have been wedded to gentleness?

**

Delicacy of an intricate

mesh of our thought and meals and talking

has brought me to this exaltation

of syllables and a speechlessness–

to December dusk, and desk, and skin

in the amber of our listening.

**

Dawn again pink with munificence;

heart again blurred by its ignorance;

toward you in that equation I turn–

and you, in turn, invovle our being

spun like wool from which soul is weaving

a use for that useless opulence.

**

Doing and making–the end served by

what it is we make, and what we do,

is what has made me: making and you.