POETS’ CORNER: FINAL 4 FOR VALENTINE’S DAY

13 Feb POETS’ CORNER: FINAL 4 FOR VALENTINE’S DAY

Editor’s note: Here’s a fact about the holiday: worldwide, over 50 million roses are given for Valentine’s Day each year. Personally I prefer the bouquet of poems Telluride Inside… and Out has published all week. The work is by our great regional poets, specifically David Feela, Art Goodtimes and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, our Word Woman and relative newcomer, Erika Gordon. Erika writes poetry with one hand while juggling children and working educational liaison for the Telluride Film Festival with the other. These four poems one by Rosemerry (sensuous, heartfelt), one by Art (lusty) and Erika’s two (spare and romantic) conclude the series.

(The “Strawberry Heart” is part of a series of heart images photographed by Rosemerry.)

Strawberry heart

HAPPY  VALENTINE’S DAY!

But 1-800-Flowers Couldn’t Deliver (by Rosemerry)

I didn’t really want to send flowers, anyway. Better to send the blue heron I was watching tonight
as it waded the river. Better to send its ungainly flight,
how it rose liltingly above the cliffs then disappeared.
Better to send the feeling that rose in me when,
like a visual echo, the great bird returned, this time
directly above me, its wings a dark silhouette in the pinking sky. As it is, I send the silence after, silence the way the water is silent when it has no shore to kiss. As it is, I send silence, silence the way the lilies I thought to send would have opened in your room, silent as their fragrance.

A’courtingly (by Art)

Comes now
the wild one

prim in her butch cut gray
sparking lyric applause.

She smiles
lighting a match

that explodes cold worlds
into hot new smoke.

And me poor joke. Bloke.
Immortal matchwood.

I’m a grove of aspen
on fire.

Love on Sunday (by Erika)

It is the February night
wrapped in a thousand

blankets, it is new snow
falling and wine in a ball jar,

a room ripe with music,
a bathtub full of reflection. It is

the way fire rises up
and up to become

the air. It is the weight
of a body. It is an answer

without a question,
a reason with no

reason, it is tears
falling into still water.

Horizon (by Erika)

Dissolve
into love

like sunlight
in the ocean –

all the blue
of sky and sea

but always a line
to notice

the difference.