Valentine House

By Sarah Wyman

It was a love come undone, no more heart cards in red.

She would need to explain, fold story in a neat box.

One doesn’t return gifts holding their chemical dust

from the packaging factory, unopened offerings, or sign-

ed missives yellowed with time. Such a long tenure of love,

skin showing its dryness like paper over the place

where a ring weighed her hand once placed  

passionately wherever he said, dish suds or red-

denning root, routine rumble of night, stuck in a room of love-

ly velvet cabbage rose sofas, a thief’s reach from the jewelry box

by a double-hung window showing the peeling signs

of neglect – someone had been drinking and dancing not dust-

ing the chaise lounge or knickknacks on bureaus as one does

to demonstrate care and commitment, shared place,

dwelling in coupledom, with a common determination to sig-

nal outwardly that inner adoration – one assumes a red

letter day for joy, citing passionate attachment by the mailbox

or at the theater, their arms locked, their looks of love

enough to convince the most desperate cynic of love’s

everlasting desire rather than the twisted pile of dust

she had accumulated through her dream-trashing giant box

of rejected notes and presents piled all over the place.

And then the message she finally wrote, and he read,

tearing his hair then dwelling in new knowledge with a sigh.

Knowing he could roll through any stop sign,

he hurried out to draw sidewalk chalk declarations of love

there on hands and knees just below the corner’s hexagon in red

where diggers unearth the sewers and trucks splash their dust.

Near the site of their last stroll, a street cellist plays

a compelling tune that sounds familiar like Bach’s

Suite Number One, but when he reaches for change, his back’s

out again, piercing flash of pain, a distracting sign

that the body tends to weaken and creak when he plays

like he’s ageless, resolute, cruising the bars again, poaching love

where he can. Around the corner he misses her, a flush skirt does

touch his heartstrings like the cheesiest story he’s ever read

but he knows this will be no season for red

valentine hearts. He might even return to dust

the abandoned house where once he knew love.

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Sarah Wyman lives in the Hudson Valley where she writes and teaches about literature and the visual arts at SUNY New Paltz. She co-facilitates the Sustainability Learning Community and teaches poetry workshops at Shawangunk Prison. Her poetry has appeared in aaduna, Mudfish, Ekphrasis, San Pedro River Review, Potomac Review, Lightwood, Heron Clan XI, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Poets of the Hudson Valley, and other venues. Her books are Sighted Stones (FLP 2018) and Fried Goldfinch (Codhill 2021).