Poetry on the Salish Sea and Centrum present to you: The Language of Love, A Valentine’s Day Reading

Art news by Melissa O’Neil

Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. 

Reading starts at 7 p.m.

Reception after at Taps (across the street)

This Valentine’s Day, fourteen poets from around the Salish Sea will gather on the 14th day of February to read two love poems. This reading, focused on, what else, love, will take place at the Wheeler Theater at Fort Worden State Park and is free and open to the public. Each poet will read a love poem they wrote and a love poem they love written by someone else.

Join us on February 14th to hear opener Sabrina Hill and poets Janeen Armstrong, Dawn Pichon Barron, Eric Greenwell, Nanya Jhingran, Ted McMahon, Sati Mookherjee, Abby E. Murray, Tamarah Rockwood, S. Salazar, Rachel Sullivan, Thena Westfall, Haines Whitacre, Lisbeth White, and me, Melissa O’Neil.

As I prepare my reading for Valentine’s Day, here are some thoughts on love, in 14 parts.

Part 1

On Saturday, my two littler kids had their final basketball games of the season. They both played tenaciously, defended, scored, dribbled, all with a group of their friends. They were grace mixed with a little bit of sweat. It was beautiful to witness. Their coaches coached the parents all season: “Don’t talk about what the game should have been. Talk about how you loved watching them.”

Part 2

On Saturday night, I took my teenage daughter to Seattle for a concert, to see Freya Skye, another teenage girl. The Paramount Theater was packed with teenage girls and their parents, with the disco ball shimmering overhead. My daughter said it felt like the safest place in Seattle: a bunch of teenage girls and their parents. I tried to adjust my face and not weep, because the world is a dumpster fire, and teenage girls are the fuel. The teenagers were dressed in sparkles and sequins, and when Freya came onto the stage in her sparkles and sequins, the girls all screamed and sang at the top of their lungs, because they knew all of the words. The disco ball shone on the fresh, sparkly faces of these young people and their not-so-young parents, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that teenage girls might save the world.

Part 3

The same teenage daughter wrote her first sonnet this month, a fourteen-line poem with a specific rhyme scheme. She wouldn’t let me read hers, because apparently it’s important for teenagers to individuate, and in two years, she’ll really put that into practice and leave for college, something I am already bracing myself for. But I digress. My daughter did let me see the picture that accompanied the poem, a painting of an eyeball. It held a multitude of words.

Part 4

In college, I wore black on Valentine’s Day, as a physical gesture of my grief about romantic love, thinking it a lost cause. I couldn’t see past romantic love’s nose, didn’t know how many facets love could hold, how many fractals could be made out of one word.

Part 5

I once gifted a Sandra Boynton picture book to my partner on Valentine’s Day, a book called Consider Love: Its Moods and Many Ways. Each page details a different kind of love, as assigned by Boynton. In one picture, a turtle has removed its shell and is using said shell as a step stool to reach his partner who is standing on a bluff above him, with the title “bold love”. After twenty-four years together, this image still encapsulates my partner and me, how we still love each other. 

Part 6

In December, my parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, a feat if ever there was one. Dad had to spend some time in the hospital, and my mom, who has dementia, went with me to pick him up. When we saw him, she rushed to him, and he hugged her, rubbed her back as she wept, saying to her, over and over, “It’s alright.” I left to give them time together, and on my return, they were sitting side by side on the make-shift couch. He was fast asleep, his head on her shoulder, and she beamed at me like she was the luckiest person in the world. They are home to one another.

Part 7

My youngest daughter sometimes hugs me in the morning, her face tired still, tucked into me, because, she says, I make her feel safe. I am also annoying, because I try to help do her hair, and she insists I give it up, her curls wild, because evidently safety is better than a coiffed appearance. So I try to adjust my expectations and kiss her lovely face more, hug her closer to me, because she also makes me feel safe.

Part 8

My teenager sleeps in late on the weekends. When I jostle her leg, she looks at me like she did when she was little, and says, “Mama!” with such delight. When she was three, she woke up, and said, “Mama, I had a dream about me and you.” Pause. “Me, me, me, you, you, you.”

Part 9

My littlest boy took school field trips to the same “secret sit spot”, as the teachers tagged it, for two years running. Once at their secret sit spot, each student would pull out a piece of plastic and sit on it, open their journals, and write about what they observed, what they saw or heard or smelled, how things had changed since they were there the month before. My son’s spot is by the bluff, where you can hear the water, the ocean tide moving in and out, like a promise. 

On a walk on Sunday, running late to the chamber concert of a radical, young queer group of musicians, my son asked if I wanted to revisit his secret sit spot. With fourteen minutes to spare before the concert started, I worried for a moment, then said yes. We found the trail, his spot, and the fairy house he made last year, still somehow standing. We both marveled for a moment, and he said, “You know, it’s just good to get outside most days.” 

Part 10

The Poesis Quartet played a concert at Centrum on Sunday right before the Super Bowl. This radical, young queer quartet did things with stringed instruments that were lively and fun, that took us, the audience, on a ride through grief and celebration, had us laughing and clapping. They were a joy to behold, a pinprick of light.

Part 11

Bad Bunny was the halftime show at the Super Bowl party. I nestled in next to my dear friends where, not only did the Seahawks win, but there were more field goals than ever before, really putting the “foot” in American football. And Bad Bunny put the “American” back in all of the Americas, North, Central, and South, and reminded the audience that Latino and Caribbean culture is a celebration, a raucous, beautiful coming together of cultures and people where, Bad Bunny suggests, it is less important that you understand Spanish and more important that you dance. At the end of his performance, he listed the countries of all of the Americas and held a football that said, “Together, we are America.” In these dark, ICE-filled times, this celebration of Latino culture was exactly what my heart needed. He brought light and love and reminded us with a huge billboard, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” 

Part 12

This world is a precarious place, it is. Humans, fragile. It’s possible that British psychologist Tim Loma was right about the fourteen flavors of love (experiential love, aesthetic love, love of rootedness, love of friends, self-esteem, family love, passionate love, playful love, possessive love, rational love, unfortunate love, compassionate love, momentary love, reverential love), and I think I might have accidentally experienced most of these flavors over the course of the last forty-eight hours. What a delight, what a wonder it is, this ride, this life.

Part 13

Let us hold on to this reminder that Hafiz, 14th-century Persian poet, offers: “Nothing evolves us like love.” 

Part 14

I was asked to read two poems about love at the Wheeler Theater on February 14th. I said yes, because, more than anything else right now, love matters. See you Saturday.  With love.