Valentine
By Paul Carroll
Our matchbox bedroom in the loft above your
sculpture factory
Turns magical at times
Behind its dark blue Druid door. Last night,
Inside you, sweetheart,
It felt as if I were coming from the soul itself.
And that Indian Summer Sunday afternoon a year
ago
When the bed became a meadow
Of purple thistles, the honey hidden at the bottom
of the stem
Farm kids know to find
For the sweetest suck of all.
And sometimes in the winter when the room turns
into a Cornell box
Filled with the everyday miracles—
Soap bubble pipe and thimble, wooden rabbits
And old tan magazine illustrations of the Zodiac.
Or turns into an igloo in which the only place to
go
Is to burrow here below the yellow blanket and
the pillows
To the South Pacific
Of ourselves. And then those mornings on
vacation
Gentle as the feathers of a light spring rain, and
at the same time hard, like the beak
Of a hawk. You are where I belong.
Copyright Credit: Paul Carroll, "Valentine" from The Garden of Earthly Delights. Copyright © 1986 by Paul Carroll. Reprinted by permission of Maryrose Carroll.
Source: Paul Carroll, "Valentine (pg 25)" from The Garden of Earthly Delights. Copyright © 1986 by Paul Carroll. (Chicago Office of Fine Arts, Chicago, 1986)