A Little Something for Valentine's Day

Someone on Twitter had posted a question asking for people's favorite love poems, and that sent me back in time. It's been a LONG time since I've read any poetry. But when I was an English major in college, I read quite a bit of it and even took a course called Critical Approaches to Poetry. During that time, I developed an appreciation for Theodore Roethke. So in honor of Valentine's Day, here is one of his love poems:

The Dream

I met her as a blossom on a stem

Before she ever breathed, and in that dream

The mind remembers from a deeper sleep:

Eye learned from eye, cold lip from sensual lip.

My dream divided on a point of fire;

Light hardened on the water where we were;

A bird sang low; the moonlight sifted in;

The water rippled, and she rippled on.

She came toward me in the flowing air,

A shape of change, encircled by its fire.

I watched her there, between me and the moon;

The bushes and the stones danced on and on;

I touched her shadow when the light delayed;

I turned my face away, and yet she stayed.

A bird sang from the center of a tree;

She loved the wind because the wind loved me.

Love is not love until love's vulnerable.

She slowed to sigh, in that long interval.

A small bird flew in circles where we stood;

The deer came down, out of the dappled wood.

All who remember, doubt. Who calls that strange?

I tossed a stone, and listened to its plunge.

She knew the grammar of least motion, she

Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.

She held her body steady in the wind;

Our shadows met, and slowly swung around;

She turned the field into a glittering sea;

I played in flame and water like a boy

And I swayed out beyond the white seafoam; 

Like a wet log, I sang within a flame.

In that last while, eternity's confine,

I came to love, I came into my own.