If Walt Whitman were a Greeting Card Writer
O Valentine! My Valentine!
Your face is everywhere;
I see it in the dead leaves;
I see it in the toadstools in the wood;
I see it in the lake scum and the swamp moss;
But I do not see it in the peat bogs;
O Valentine!
You are the bullfrog croaking and the jackal
howling and the buzzard screaming,
And occasionally the gopher thinking;
My heart is nature’s toothpaste tube, and
you are the force eternal that squeezes
out the final, itsy-bitsy sweetness;
O me!
O you!
O me! O you!
O us!
O Valentine!