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Valentine's Day


Eyewear hereby offers a litte pre-Valentine's poetry on the cusp of the great day for (and of) Eros. Much love to you and your beloved (and other loved ones).
Hotel Oriental

sometimes the visible is the deeper world
Christmas lights in Shanghai

the rain is her leaving
a hotel is a room that you buy with minutes & days

the woman next door keeps your dollars in a tin box
a body is also a place you can wait in

gambling, until the end of longing
& thin walls let desire through

like rain-obscured radio or the click-click of vinyl
how you love is how photographs will remember you:

in dark suits, hair slicked back, slim moustache, a body
carrying itself like a film actor’s

the rain projects its film on the green wall
& its ghost, its furrows

its slinking unfolding rivulets of time
every drop that falls has hurt you in its motion

each drop her heel in the hall, her
coming forward, going away

in the hotel you shared as each body shares its double
its mind, with some element of the visible

crossing through small square panes
of the opaque glass that sometimes appears to be

all there is of the present & surface, texture & reflection
how it stands behind us, this flat, deep screen

all that was good is a picture or a song
of her moving between lingering smoke & a dream

of a nightclub in Hong Kong where
nothing destined was wrong

if properly lit, red blue green
all that can be loved can be heard & seen
poem by Todd Swift
[note: this love poem originally appeared in the pamphlet Natural Curve, from Rubicon Press, Alberta, 2006]

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