The Octopus Poem I Love So Much

It's February, which some would call love poem season. (I love a good love poem.) I love Valentine's Day not only for the coupledom but for the general sentiment and atmosphere. What use is there in not leaning into the romance of everything?

Still, my favorite love poems (per se) tend to be more about gratitude and the overflow—that sense of 'love with nowhere to go' just for all the beauty in the world (and the bittersweet, too, hence that quote about grief being love with nowhere to go.)

I am a romantic person in the sense that I'm always grateful and sappy for the little things, and generally see the world through such rose-colored glasses, but don't view it as naïvete or weakness to think that all things can be either resonant or stunning. The viewer and the viewed!

Anyway, it would be easy to go for Neruda or Rilke (who I will absolutely share excerpts of shortly), but getting to share my Jane Hirshfield epigraph for Mountain Sounds reminded me that I can also just share bits on the blog.

Thanks for reading Words Like Silver! Subscribe for free to support my work.

Subscribe Now

placeholder

I have a running collection of the lovey-dovey quotes that have struck me lately within my February Scrapbook and will get my happy list up and running shortly (and here is January's for reference) but the page format doesn't lend itself well to poetry excerpts. So:

An Octopus Has Three Whole Hearts

and sometimes I lie awake thinking

about all that lub-dubbing

on the ocean floor and no one to hear it.

What kind of god gives a cephalopod

three but a human only one?

I want more thumps. I want more time.

I want to waste my love on everything.

Give me a heart for Ohio. Another

for a silk butter moon. Another

for the park bench man who swoons

for doves, his quiet hands full of crumbs.