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.