An Age of Enlightenment 

 

We can do this. 

Without benefit of a tribe. 

In the absence of family. 

Having outlived many friends and lovers. 

Having wailed at the sky and heard no answer. 

Honing the ability to make do. 

Taking compliments and criticism with a grain of salt. 

Realizing we are host to every visitor, 

even the thoughts that arrive willy nilly. 

Finding romance the wanting of Love for the sake of loving. 

Finding Creativity a religion and the Earth its church. 

Loving the stars too fondly to be fearful of night. 

We discover less and less is needed for a happy life. 

  

Peter Valentyne

1/26/24 

The Long Night’s Journey into Day

Night is a mirror lying on its back.

To wake is to resurface. Think

dreamer as deep see diver.

You say I love you to someone

you’ve no memory of having known.

Is this how we meet ourselves?

Night is a journey into mountains by car,

a vehicle someone else is driving

while we lay immobile in the back seat

barely able to lift our heads.

Why trust where we are being taken?

Why not?

I once read that all our memories

are reconstituted by one's own longing.

If so, our mothers are knit together,

faded throws made from borrowed yarn.

Our fathers, long having forgotten

how to be men, wait at

the crossroads, weathered scarecrows

oblivious to the sky.

Here’s what we need to know:

The tyrant is you.

The angel is you.

Your dog is you.

The bully is you.

Your friend is you.

You sing every song

you bare witness to,

if only from the inside.

Dredged from a hole in the ice

you return to a world of babbling boxes,

where toilet paper is made to resemble clouds,

where decorating your home is sheer autobiography,

where everyone carries their own remote controls,

where the loudest become dog whistles for the weak-minded,

where the sky is no longer free to gaze up at,

where our trash is swept under a rug of ocean water,

where we buy flowers for the privilege of watching them die,

where those who built this country are discarded,

defiled statues dropped from a great height.

Where artists are expunged for exorcising their sins in public,

as the body stores its fears and sorrows in its bones,

where churches slowly lose their sanctity

due to their lack of sunlight,

and history is made from the faulty memories

of an unreliable narrator returning home

from another dream of war.

Now

let your peace begin.

12/25/23

My Art is a Phoenix

 

And so it is that in the history of art,

everything arises from loss,

tragedy, or unhappiness.

Art is a phoenix.

When was good art ever made from happiness?

Who works when they’re happy?

So this is the dilemma:

How to make art

and still be happy?

 

If the most vulgar transmission of knowledge

is the spoken word, then

the highest may be sitting in silence

without a word uttered between

student

(viewer, reader, seer, listener)

and master

(artist, God, teacher).

With that kind of communication,

an object between observer and observed

may be unnecessary.

To sit and contemplate

a leaf, a rock, a cloud,

it becomes possible to commune

with what is

without an intermediary.

Much like the concept of pure cinema,

the attempt to return to the medium’s

elemental origins,

feels nothing less than avant-garde.

 

God creates things

therefore, I create things

because it is in my DNA to do so.

God creates things for us.

Did you think he was doing this

for himself?

God is not self-absorbed,

he longs to share everything,

to have his creation seen,

heard, felt, smelt.

God, what an inadequate word

for thee supreme artist.

God, the very word tastes

medieval in the mouth.

 

An artist is appropriately possessed

and completely diseased by

creativity and ideas.

For that, he is willing

to sacrifice everything.

There will be pain.

Perhaps there must be pain.

 

How to live with pain

so that it strengthens and informs

and makes me more present

to the beatitude inherent in every moment?

Beauty is not an object apart from,

but a way of perceiving.

Is beauty beautiful

if no one’s there to perceive it?

Take that old chestnut:

Does a tree falling in the forest

make a sound if no one is there to hear it?

Is the sky at dawn spectacular

if we are fast asleep in our beds?

The world demands our attention

and beauty is spiritualizing.

That way we play a part in it.

It is connective.

Beauty is a vocation;

a calling I feel I must answer.

Otherwise,

I risk being a factory run by a tyrant,

a memory afraid to be erased,

a heart at odds with desiring,

a mouth without need for a face!

 

And finally,

of all the plants I planted in my garden,

what I did not plant has flourished the most.

Either seeds were hidden in the soil

or the wind carried a spore willy nilly

to my little plot of ground.

So often that’s how life feels.

I plant and sew and plan and then

something unexpected springs up

so easily on its own.

 

11/23/23

The Woman Who Knew All Too Well

(for Joan Valentina)

 

i

That her health was a soldier

too wounded to correspond.

That her body was in a lover’s quarrel

with an inopportune world.

That the simple act of walking

was to drag an anchor

across unforgiving ground.

That each breath she took

was a flower devoid of

its heavenly scent.

 

And so

this woman who knew all too well

has passed away.

 

ii

Though my life only brushed hers

like a moth grazing a bulb ablaze with light,

her absence has gnawed a hole

in the fabric of the world.

Aside from my lackadaisical interest

in the lives of others

I was no match for her uncanny radar,

nor could my faintly fractured mind

hold a candle to the bated breadth

of her insatiable curiosity.

I could only stand back and marvel

at her clever knack for discernment.

 

I would not be wrong to say

she knew a thing or two

about everything and everyone,

peering room by room through

a spy glass made for drawing down the stars.

 

I could see her apartment window from mine

and every now and then I’d glance

across and notice her scrolling the internet

in a lonely pool of light, her lamp

casting a theatrical spot

as if she were the sole star

in a bare bones production of her life.

That vacant light had caught my eye

as it had been on night and day

for weeks with her missing at the controls.

 

I wondered if she might be in hospital

knowing she would know if it were

the other way around.

I suddenly had the unsettling feeling

I might never see her again.

 

Though she was never

one to withdraw from the world,

her Lupis had lately gotten the best of her.

Even so, she would find ways to stay

on top of goings on,

even if by more subversive means.

Nothing could stop her desire to know.

 

Now I wonder,

where has all that knowing gone?

 

iii

Another’s death tilts the mind’s

tender machinery.

It simply does not compute

to be suddenly and irreversibly erased!

For the habitual problem solver,

resourcefulness is the highest religion.

 

It’s true I once described her as

tilting every room she entered

so that all roads led to her.

At a party, she’d speak

without a pause on any subject

as if from the axis of her

own personal wheel of fortune

with the inarguable voice

of lived experience.

The food she prepared.

The parts she played.

The clothes she wore.

The people she helped.

The stories she shared.

The problems she solved.

The paths she took.

 

Nothing escaped

her powers of observation.

She, the mystery solver.

She, the truth decoder.

She, the gossip monger.

She, the storyteller.

She, the advice provider.

She, the mentor

for finessing every room.

 

As I write this the morning after,

The Queen of Outer Space

is playing on TCM

and an unlikely thought presents itself:

How much world must we

hold inside ourselves

so as not to fade

when we are gone?

 

Maybe because she once said

I was her favorite poet,

I am left too numb

to do her justice

with a single line.

 

 

11/21/23