‘Heart to Heart’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Today is Valentine’s Day, as forced and materialistic a holiday as they come, but it’ll never die because, at the least, expressing and honoring love is a timeless thing. It’s easy to dismiss the cliché, to shrug off the universal re-treaded images of hearts and sleeves and longing and stars. Screw that. Love matters; expressing love matters. More so than ever, perhaps.
There’s likely no body part better represented in poetry than the human heart. Rita Dove’s poem, ‘Heart to Heart,’ dives into several well-worn heart-based clichés and somehow emerges with a hammering image: “Still, / I feel it inside / its cage sounding / a dull tattoo: / I want, I want—”. Later tonight my partner and I are going to build a tent fort in the living room and drink champagne, I’ll read them this poem and say “I love you” and who fucking cares if Valentine’s Day is a murk of irony and saccharine banality. Love matters. Honor it however you can.