The poem she needed Valentine’s Day, and every day

The desperate young woman left a message for me on a Tuesday morning when my voicemail was jammed with angry readers calling about a comparison I’d made between a 35-year-old mother of two who was deported to Mexico and the civil-rights icon Rosa Parks. I listened to comment after comment, as I always do, until the general tenor of the messages had progressed from nasty to menacing to psychotic. Then, I stopped. A day later, when I’d refueled my resolve and went back to the messages, I found that I was too late. At least for this young woman. At least for this year. She said: “Mr. Montini. I know this is a weird request, but it’s Valentine’s Day and, honestly, I’m a little panicked. You came to speak to a class I had at ASU some years ago, and one of the things I remember you saying was that journalists should read poetry. I thought that was strange, but I actually made notes about your suggestions, only I don’t have them anymore.

“I’m married now, and I was looking for a poem to include in a Valentine’s Day card for my husband. I remember you saying something about knowing the best love poem ever, but I can’t remember what it was. Weird, right? But if this makes any sense and is something you recall and could let me know …” Finally, a question of some value. And I failed her. I’m sorry. Should the need arise for next Valentine’s Day, however, or for any other suitable occasion, or for no occasion at all, the poem in question is W.B. Yeats’

“When You Are Old,” which ends:

And bending down beside the glowing bars, / Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. It’s perfect. There are poetry lovers and academics who would disagree with me, many of them a thousand times more learned and qualified than I am. They’d be wrong. Perhaps they’d reference Shakespeare’s sonnets, which are great.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments … and so on. I waver myself, on occasion. I might tilt on some days toward Anne Sexton or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Frank O’Hara or Elizabeth Bishop or, of course, e.e. cummings.

since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you.

I might consider Marvin Bell’s “To Dorothy,” which begins: You are not beautiful, exactly / You are beautiful, inexactly.

Or to Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman,” which ends: These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: / (I measure time by how a body sways).

There is heartache and beauty as well in Lisel Mueller’s “Romantics.” And in Raymond Carver’s brief “Late Fragment.”

Or I might search through Arizona’s own treasure-filled poetry vault. Two of America’s great poets live here — Norman Dubie and Alberto Rios.

Then again, I might drift toward other Yeats poems. “The Choice,” perhaps. Or “Never Give All the Heart.” Or “Drinking Song.” Or “The Mermaid.”

But for Valentine’s Day, it must be “When You Are Old.” Just don’t stop there. I’ve said before that poets are more necessary than journalists. That has never been more true than now, as proved in one stanza of a 1955 poem by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.