Now, if that’s not a face that screams romance….

Anyway.

Here are a few of my favorites you might enjoy -whether you are feeling lovey-dovey, or thoughtful, or even lonely this Valentine’s Day.

Your Feet

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

Clenched Soul

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it’s you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Love Sonnet XVII

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Sighing,

• My husband was out of town.
• I slept in way too long.
• I finally managed to catch the poor stray cat that has been (loudly) freezing to death outside our house.
• I lost my cell phone under a pile of laundry.
• I drove the cat to the shelter and sort of got lost on the way there.
• I didn’t get to go shopping with K because of the feline situation…and sort of the getting lost situation…
• I swept the entire first floor and mopped to get rid of all the sand and salt and nasty winter stuff.
• I tried to train the dog to use his new dog bed. It went poorly:

• …and then all of a sudden it went well:

• And then it went poorly again:

• And then, when I decided to call it a night, I hastily grabbed the dog bed off the mantel to head upstairs.
• And then this happened:

• And then I may have cried a little.

• Then I swept the floor again.
• And promptly went to bed.

Today is going much better

Amping up for Monday,

Isn’t it pretty, sitting there on the mantel?

Oh wait…did I say he loved it? Well, it’s a tough kind of love – the kind of love where you chew and rip things apart as fast as you can. After removing several large hunks of the inner foam, his bed was taken away.

This has pretty much been my day:

He seems truly sorry.

But that’s just because you can’t hear the growling.

Still finding pieces of foam,

K and I hosted a small Halloween party last night. A few close friends and most of my family were involved – and everyone had at least some semblance of a costume.

K worked her magic with the decorating…

…while I stuck with what I know best, eatingpreparing food. These oreo truffles were a smash hit:

And, the pièce de résistance, spooky ghost meringues!

Oh, wait. Did you think those were my little sweet ghosts? They aren’t. That’s the photo from Heidi Swanson’s recipe. Unfortunately, meringue has proven to be out of my league.

Exhibit A:

He looks like a sad, arctic peep. Or, bird poop. Neither particularly cute nor appetizing.

And, the really pathetic part is that it took me about 2.5 hours to create these little piles of misery. I whisked and whisked, and yet the egg whites never rose. Stiff peaks eluded me. After an hour, I gave up and piped these guys out, watching as they slowly folded in on themselves.

I baked them, hoping that maybe looks wouldn’t indicate taste. They still had a chance. To let them completely dry out, I left them in the oven after I had turned it off.

And then…and then…..I forgot they existed. K asked me to preheat the oven for her brownies, and I happily obliged. Minutes later, the charming smell of burnt meringue filled the air.

I managed to get them out before they turned brown or crumbled, but they were already cracked and brittle. They were never meant to be.

It was a Halloween tragedy, which, I suppose, is fitting.

This one was taunting me:

Just keepin’ it real over here at Homage, and letting you know that no one’s perfect. (Right? Right? Please, tell me I’m not the only one who has ever fried a dumpy meringue ghost…)

Hope your weekend was spooky,