My heart is humming a tune
Valentine's Day with Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove
In February hearts appear in conspicuous places.
Age nineteen, my first winter living alone. Basement apartment in a university neighbourhood. My route to the subway took me past stately Victorian and Edwardian houses, three and four storeys high, their faces impenetrable, unwilling to reveal hints about who lived inside them. There were fraternities whose lawns the day after a party became cemeteries of excess—red party cups were always blowing in the wind, catching in fences.
I wore a crimson knee-length vintage coat that winter. It had a leopard print collar. I felt strange wearing it in February, believing it would be mistaken as costume, a young woman leaning into the theatrics of Valentine’s Day. I remember approaching the crosswalk nearest to the subway station, seeing red on the road.
My first thought: gore. Maybe remnants from an early morning car accident. The colour teased the road, like mirage. As I got closer, I saw what it was.
Frat boys, drunk in the middle of the night, perhaps on a dare, spray painted the pavement—a blood red heart assuming the entire intersection.
This past weekend, my mother and I were driving north to her place, a small town about an hour outside of the city. Along that highway the winter landscape is only ever a melange of dead earth hues, a sullied white from road salt, grey snow. To see something red on the horizon, in the ditch, on someone’s property, is to expect death: a fresh kill, possibly—food is scarce this time of year, animals are getting restless, the heart wants what it wants.
Half a mile up the road, a blot of red on the passenger side.
(Why, when I see red, am I so quick to imagine neon lights screaming death! death! death!?)
As the car sped along, as we neared the scene, I started laughing almost to the point of tears. A willow tree had been cut down. In the wound of its trunk, someone had spray painted a red heart for passersby to see. They could have left the trunk as is—just a dead thing at the side of the road, a sorry-looking symbol of what had once existed in its place—but instead the woodcutter chose to send a message, a wish, a reminder. A simple red heart, a heart which can mean so many things.
Below are a collection of poems that seem apt to share today—ones that aren’t so much declarations of love, as they are suggestions, reflections, echoes, rebellions.
I love Nikki Giovanni’s “You are There”, a poem from her collection Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (click the photo to hear a recording of it).
Colors passing through us by Marge Piercy celebrates love through the lens of color: “Here is my bouquet, here is a sing / song of all the things you make / me think of.”
Lately I’ve been enjoying poems which study the soul of the season, like February: Thinking of Flowers by Jane Kenyon—
Now wind torments the field,
turning the white surface back
on itself, back and back on itself,
like an animal licking a wound.Nothing but white--the air, the light;
only one brown milkweed pod
bobbing in the gully, smallest
brown boat on the immense tide.A single green sprouting thing
would restore me. . . .Then think of the tall delphinium,
swaying, or the bee when it comes
to the tongue of the burgundy lily.
Jean Valentine reminds a lover
I’m, you know, still here,
tulip, resin, temporary—
in her poem, For love.
And then there’s Chocolate by Rita Dove:
Velvet fruit, exquisite square
I hold up to sniff
between finger and thumb —how you numb me
with your rich attentions!
If I don't eat you quickly,you'll melt in my palm.
Pleasure seeker, if I let you
you'd liquefy everywhere.Knotted smoke, dark punch
of earth and night and leaf,
for a taste of youany woman would gladly
crumble to ruin.
Enough chatter: I am readyto fall in love!
Finally, Carol Ann Duffy offers an unconventional gift in Valentine:
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
Such beautiful selections of Poetry on Valentine's Day! 😍