bellascribe

This morning C. gave me the same Valentine he’s given me some other past Valentine’s Day, which was no big surprise to me since I’d come across the card the other day and read it then. “There is only one true happiness in life: to love and be loved. — George Sand” the card front reads. But because I commented then when I read it that he’d given me this same card before, C. was careful to make it new again with what he wrote on the inside.

I have since had my doubts that maybe it was not C who had given me this card before after all.

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Recipients of valentines from secret admirers may find this How-to helpful.

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Love poems. Lust poems. (From Poetry.org)

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Listen: Privilege of Being, Robert Hass, a poet who acknowledges that poets traffic in beauty but the world isn’t beautiful. Here’s some of the poem (from Human Wishes, Ecco Press, 1989):

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy–
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed–
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shutter pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling …
dear heart …
… this truth.
And the man …
… runs beside her… thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

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The night before last we had a late dinner at a Thai restaurant near this hotel. It was 9:30 or so; there were only three or four other diners. Two Asian (presumably Thai) women began festooning the place with Valentine’s Day decorations: tying helium balloons to some of the chair backs, hanging paper cupids above the bar, stretching accordion-like and crepe paper swags from one side of the room to the other. An Asian man came out from the kitchen and joined in their excited, almost giddy chatter as they decorated. Finished, the woman in charge came to our table and, turning to admire their handiwork, said, “It’s cute?” She caught sight of our waiter, a young guy — American, who had an immense dark mass of hair stacked on top of his head that was almost an Afro but too straight and dense to be thought of as anything other than a huge thatch — who stood apart from the activity, looking as if he wished he were far, far away. “What happened?” she asked him. (Interesting choice of words; you would have likely put it “What’s wrong?”) The waiter answered: “I feel like I’m surrounded by false messages.”