From Your Valentine
Dove, Rita
Poem From Your Valentine (While imprisoned, the future saint cured the jailer's daughter of her blindness. On the eve of his execution, he left her a farewell note, signed "From your...
...O my heart is vigilant, hardened to a single point it spins upon...
...You bring its hunger back to whisper in my ear and I write it down, ears burning— all that pierced, burst, suppurating anguish rendered into words, hopeless scraps you slip under your skirts, unabashed, baring a thigh you cannot see...
...Her most recent poetry collection is "On the Bus with Rosa Parks...
...The days pass...
...I am calm when I can hear your approach...
...How else to locate the anger in a tongue's chk chk, the swift bite of his keys before his hand slices the air...
...I feel you listening for me, my breathing measured to your hurried step...
...And when I speak, you lift your entire body into my voice, and I can look at you all I want—I sin over and over in gluttonous gazing, your careful and thirsty face a mirror to my own...
...On the eve of his execution, he left her a farewell note, signed "From your Valentine...
...Yet this sight does not stir me...
...Other recent works include the play "The Darker Face of the Earth" and the song cycle "Seven for Luck," with music composed by John Williams...
...Only when darkness swallows and you are all around me and inside the dark— O then I am most alive, spitted and turning, and I dread . . . not pain, snug in its own embrace, not being without you, since I am alone already—but the moment before death, when pain and absence blur, when I'll become pure sensation...
...Martyrdom is easy: I'll take the coward's path and insist upon my God, my righteous love . . . until that love snuffs out the man before you, the one you see clearly, who lives now for the first time...
...Like a shell whose portion of ocean is constantly rocking, keeping time, you carry the cell of yourself quietly...
...Is this what you live in, dearest blind girl, my jailer's daughter...
...Rita Dove Rita Dove, former United States Poet Laureate, has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal...
...Outside the city shouts, it growls and throbs...
...Night floats, continuous, a dark sheen in terror's velvet grip...
...God's will is shameless...
...W. W. Norton will publish her eighth volume of poetry, "American Smooth," this fall...
Vol. 68 • February 2004 • No. 2
