Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry for Valentine’s Day

13 Feb Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry for Valentine’s Day

Did you know that over 50 million roses are given for Valentine’s Day each year? Personally I prefer the bouquet of poems Telluride Inside… and Out will be publishing this week, starting with the following exotic arrangement by beloved poet and friend Rosemerry Trommer, Telluride’s Word Woman. In these challenging times when love seems to have gotten lost in the fog of warring words, what’s love got to do with it? Everything per Rosemerry. Without denying the weight of the world, Rosemerry’s luminous, insightful poems suggest love – for self and for others, including a partner – is the only good choice. Choosing the light lightens a heavy heart.

Former Western Slope Poet Laureate, Wordwoman Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer leads new series about looking at ourselves through the eyes of our country’s Laureates.

Arrangement

In my heart, a mandolin
just waiting to be played—
there are music sheets,
ignore them. Doesn’t matter
if you know how to play.
What matters is you try.
What matters is you practice
tuning the strings
until you find the way
to make them sing.
What matters is that
we both know there’s
music in there just waiting
to be found and
your hands are curious,
tender.

Walking Through the Prehistoric Journey Exhibit

And again I recall how small we are,
how ninety nine percent of all species
that have ever lived are extinct,
how thin our stripe in geologic time,
how remarkable that we are here at all.
And suddenly all that matters
is that I love you—and what are the odds?
How many billion years in the making,
this rush of gratitude, this burgeoning
joy, this thrill in the sheer Cenozoic luck
to feel the concurrent burning and quenching,
the simultaneous bite and salve, the Quaternary
gift of thriving and failing at the same time?
If it feels as if it’s taken forever to get to this place,
lover, it has. Think trilobite. T-rex. Cave bear.
Wooly mammoth. Think how little time
has passed, and how lucky, how lucky we are.

Why I Move Slowly

Today the weight of love
is a basket of river rocks
I’ve chosen to carry.

Though it’s difficult
to walk with this weight,
there’s not one rock

I would throw aside,
each unique, treasured.
There are some who walk

with an empty basket.
Their burden is light.
They move quickly

along the path.
Me, I choose to carry
the weight of love.

On a Day When the World Has Its Way With Me

Like every day, this day
it is clear that only love
will save us. Not in the grandiose

abstract way, but in the alarmingly
specific way. As in forgiveness, now.
As in choosing to hold our own hand instead

of swinging back. As in taking
three deep breaths before saying
something we regret. Love saves us

from thirsting in the desert of our lives,
but only if we save it first by
choosing it, now in this moment

of angry words, now in this moment
of clenched thoughts, now in
this moment when we’d rather

taste venom, but instead, we
pour love into our cup and
bring it to our lips and drink

and drink until once again
only love makes sense,
only love refills the cup.

Misty

And sometimes when I move
at the edge of a greatness—
a lake or a sea or a mountainside—
my insignificance thrills me
and the largest of my sadnesses
dwindles smaller than the space
between grains of sand
and in that moment,
knowing my place,
comes a love so enormous
I can love anyone, anyone,
even myself.

Between Intimacy and Independence

we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.
—Martin Heidegger

and this is how
the vessel learns
that though it’s full
there’s room for more—
those sides of us
we thought were walls
were well concealed
doors