3 Poems for Valentine's Day

13 Feb 3 Poems for Valentine's Day

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

(Ed. note: Rosemerry often sends along her poetry for special events to Telluride Inside… and Out. Enjoy her Valentine's Day offering)

Yes I Will

After all this time, we are still
just beginning to fly. Though our hair

is more white, our wings
are still unfolding, still a little wet.

And there is so much sky
we haven’t seen. If I close

my eyes I can feel it, the wind,
how it gathers beneath us

and lifts. How terrifying, love,
to not know what comes next.

And how wondrous to know
we are not bound together

and choose anyway to leap
in unison so we might see, after all these

paths we’ve walked, what
wings and a new song can do.

**

Not to Hold

It is not easy, this learning to love
by letting go. Easier to grasp, to clutch,
to hold on, and in the holding believe
that we know, know something. Could control what is.

It is not easy to fall in love with emptiness.
To cherish absence. To caress what cannot be seen.
Hard to keep the palms open when it seems
there is nothing to catch, nothing to hug,

as if our own openness mocks us and points
to just how alone we are, alone even when we do
kiss and gather and touch. I had never thought
love would be like this. So much a practice.

So little about desire. So little about our dreams.
Not about rings. Not about promises. Not about
anything that could bind us. No strings. This learning
to love by letting go. Sometimes I think I will break.

And I do. Into ten thousand thousand pieces.
It is messy, this learning to love by letting go.
And so beautiful when through the splinters
and fractures and flaws, so much light flares out.

And I love you, though not like I thought I would.
There is sky in it. Oceans. Tides and moons.
It is just not the same as it was yesterday
when I whisper I love you.

**

Another Inside

“Unity—it is a simultaneous oneness and two-ness.”
           —Joi Sharp

I know I have tried. With rings,
with vows, with naked flesh,

with poetry, with touch. I have
tried to narrow the gaps between

us, as if one is a holier number
than two. As if we might disappear

and become something more
than you and me. Something vaster. Something

wiser. Something infinitely more
pleasurable. And. Here I am. There

you are. We are two. There is no way
to make the space go away. But today,

I knew, and surely I’ve known this before,
a deep shudder of awe for what multiplies

in the opening between us …  devotion, surely.
And mystery. And the thrill in trying again and

again to draw, as we do, my love, closer.