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Valentine w/a Sentence Inside it

by Ken Meisel

Some valentines have sentences in them first. That’s why everything I loved, in one moment,

changed when you interrupted me. All love is an interruption of that

madness that makes us write what we believe. Truth is, we are vocabularies interrupted

by other vocabularies and when you interrupted my long sentence, like I was

writing it alone in a classroom, on a chalk board for what seemed like a hundred

years, I lifted the eraser in my right hand and I started erasing my own

sentence because what you had to say, in your sentence, was much more

interesting. And the trick was that, as I erased my sentence with my right hand,

I tried not to remember it because love is a kind of non-remembering of the self,

and – because the self is dense, like a treatise, or a paragraph, or filibuster monologue –

it’s best to forget it – the self – and place a firmer faith in the spontaneous,

and love is quicker, and it walks in a lightness of ease like a quickly sketched sentence

writ eternal and writ memorable, and the light fell on the cherry tree

where the other woman was reading her book, and the farmer, plowing his field

on a tractor, did what anyone would do when they are interrupted: he stopped

for a moment, cupped a hand over his brow, and so did the woman,

and they watched us from a distance with eyes, large as awe-struck sunflowers

as you interrupted me with sentences so much more interesting than my own,

and I responded to you by erasing more of me and writing my response back,

and they stood there silently together watching us with wide open eyes

writing and re-writing our sentence on the blackboard and out the door

and across the sidewalks and into the world of corn there where nobody

could stop us, and so they just looked at us like the world was ending; and

they followed us with ravenous eyes because we’re all interested in sentences,

and we’re all vocabularies just wanting to be interrupted by another vocabulary,

and the world changed from one page, or a blackboard, or a cornfield, and into

a shifting grid of words and shapes writ on a page without edit or ending;

and writ in a style of cursive where one line follows the next line in a kind

of immeasurable hide and seek and chase, and follow, from one edge over another

like two water striders streaking quickly over the expanse of an empty white page

so that the chase, and return, could find that next page and the page after that –

and love is a sentence you write or scribble until it is unnecessary to write any

longer, and, when it is no longer, the valentine you take is the heart of your life.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, The Wayfarer and Rabid Oak.

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