true that

Time is matter here

By Jean Valentine

Time is matter here
The freight train
I saw in the morning
still in the evening
inching across the flatlands
word after slow word
too many to count

And you are matter—
your eyes, your long legs,
slow breath sometimes catching
in your sleep, your head
resting against the bus window,
tired horse,
tired rider

valentine

more jean

from Little Boat

Maria Gravida

Then the gold mother began her touching me

With her long brown face & hands

She tickled me & told me I was beautiful

She held me in the ikon & we gazed

We had a pretty goldfinch   death   salavation

Love was strong as death    Peacocks walked by

Blue immortality       Finches played in black branches

Souls around the cross     It was death in life

Our gold earth gravida

Not a casket but a darkroom for our love

The herma wrought of silver, gilded in fire

Gold mother around me inside me gravida

deep freeze

Gray

gray

"the order of the mother"

one degree Fahrenheit

News armature:

Expect sleet or snow     west coming east

   You may not have wanted to be there

   It may have been because of the pain

helicopter       on your left side

man asleep

child            on your right

jean valentine

This dank autumn day

It's oddly humid for October, more like July, except the leaves are turning and falling.
K's cat died, rather we "put him to sleep." A moving on. This is the season.

Jean Valentine's new book continues to haunt. Here's why.



I was lying there

I was lying there, half-alive
in a wooden room at a Russian country place.
You sat by me quietly. It's true you left
sometimes, but came back, sat by me
kindly quietly.
Woodsman, would you go back to the little-
light-wrapped trees
and turn them on again?
The hide of the deer shivered
The summer wind riffled through my hair.
You are on
a long, patient, summer visit from death.
I am forgiven. Forgiving. To your place
the next to be born.


To my soul (2)

Will I miss you
uncanny other
in the next life?

And you & I, my other, leave
the body, not leave the earth?

And you, a child in a field,
and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,

And what we had
give way like coffee grains
brushed across paper...

What I'm reading: Jean Valentine's new book

The door is fallen down

The door is fallen down
to the house
I used to try & pry open,
in & out,
painfully,
stiff tears.

I sit underneath the cottonwoods--
Friends,
what am I meant to be doing?
Nothing. The door is fallen down
inside my open body
where all the worlds touch.



La Chalupa, the Boat

I am twenty,
drifting in la chalupa,
the blue boat painted with roses,
white lilies--

No, not drifting, I am poling
my way into my life. It seems
like another life:

There were the walls of the mind,
There were the cliffs of the mind,
There were the seven deaths,
and the seven bread-offerings--

Still, there was still
the little boat, the chalupa
you built once, slowly, in the yard, after school--


Jean Valentine
from Little Boat