Since it's Valentine's Day, here's a poem I wrote 33 years ago, when I was 21.

love poem (written ~1990, St. Louis)

Say the thick petals of a rose are falling like an angel, insensate

through the cloudy membrane of a page, falling into the green slate

of water in a glass bowl. And the water's tight-skinned. Somewhere two kids

are folding the pelts of their bodies into each other's hands. Say they're reading by touch

the hieroglyph of the tongue. The petals, too, are clinging, all at one

edge of the bowl. Like the bound sheets of a book blowing open, page by page, the thin sheets of the earth turn,

each rehearsing in its whisper, ‘here there was rock,’ and ‘here there were fish, once’; ‘here an elk was killed by wolves’.

The ground scrawls out its story, and nobody listens. We're too busy leaning

our ears to each other's hearts, teaching ourselves the quick, opening flutter and

the shutting tight of the dark volumes inside our chests. Dust always settles

on what we don't use. And yet we're surprised at what turns up in the ground, the cities, the people

clambering out of the clay into the bright sun and drawn back down. Lovers

come to each other like archaeologists, digging up strange artifacts of the heart

holding them up to the light, amazed, hold them and press them to life.