Draw her near, Shakespeare

The Column: 02.14.25

I never cared for Valentine’s Day as a kid, when we had to address a valentine to everyone in the classroom, Miss Moehlenbrock’s rule, so that every child would feel equally important — she was a true liberal, but the idea of universal fondness didn’t ring true for me, and clearly some valentines were more equal than others. Some valentines have integrity and the others are torn on dotted lines from a sheet of eight. I got a lot of those.

I was fond of Corinne and Christine because they were big readers and had been to New York City, which I had not. But the Valentine message –— “I love you, please be mine” –— wasn’t the right one. Possession wasn’t my aim.

Solomon was a romantic guy and he wrote, “Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields; let us go out early to the vineyards, and see whether the vines have budded, whether the grape blossoms have opened and the pomegranates are in bloom.” The guy just wanted to check his garden, but the woman took it as a proposal so Sol wound up with a thousand wives. A thousand wedding pictures, a thousand women saying, “Why are you so silent this morning? What did I do? Are you involved with another woman?” (Yes, 999 of them.) He had a thousand kitchens because what woman would share a kitchen with another woman and have to keep rearranging the cupboards? His book in the Bible, the Song of Solomon, was his way of sending an SOS.

I know about this because I’ve been married more often than you have. I fell in love with women because I saw myself as a rescuer — I rode in on a white horse and found a beautiful woman beset by loneliness and having trouble with her a.c. and I dismounted and fixed the problem and she threw herself in my arms. I rescued her from her small mean town and took her to my castle on the hill and naturally expected her to be delighted and for a few weeks she was and then one morning she said, “You were snoring loudly last night and I hate to mention it but you keep missing the toilet when you pee. And you go around humming the same Grateful Dead song and I wish you’d change the tune. Please.”

I rescued her from despair and made her my Queen and now she’s my editor. I galloped into her life and helped her up in the saddle behind me, her arms around me, whispering endearments in my ear as we rode through the Garden of Eden and then she says, “I think you were supposed to turn left back there” and she googles it and Siri says, “Yes, you should have turned left.”

Time passed. The horse died. I sold the castle. I use the sword now to chop greens for the salad. The escutcheon is a serving tray. Everything has changed. A tribe of digital geniuses has invaded, heroic nerds who swoop down on beautiful women in the library who are agonizing over a term paper they accidentally deleted and now, all hope lost, their career in veterinary aromatherapy dangling in the balance, young Derek recovers the file from iCloud and also shows her how to reformat complex interdependent functions into coded extended templates and she throws herself into his arms and okay, maybe his intelligence is artificial and his kisses formulaic, but she is moved by his problem-solving and maybe she marries him. I’m sure it happens all the time.

On Valentine’s Day, however, we poets have an edge. Derek thinks of the heart as a matrix and love as input with no downside, a win-win situation, which does not touch her heart, but the poet steps forward and spreads the embroidered cloths of heaven under her feet, cloths enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light, and even though he works at Burger King and lives in his parents’ basement, she cannot resist him. Language is the heart of love.

You may snore and pee on the floor but if you can write a good poem for her, you’ll be okay, pal. Write her a poem. Don’t text it. Write it on paper with a pen and she will come live with you and be your love midst valleys, woods, and fields and you will all the pleasures prove that this brief summer yields.

Discover 77 Love Sonnets by Garrison Keillor—an intimate and witty collection of poems that celebrate love in all its joy, longing and humor.

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