Introduction
I wrote a Valentine’s Day poem back in 1989, and built a
little essay around it. (The idea of
footnotes didn’t occur to me at the time.)
My essay was titled “The Safety Valentine,” because the poem—which I
encouraged my readers to pass off as their own—was so non-steamy and
understated it couldn’t possibly incite the recipient to, say, slap the poet.
That essay wasn’t very good so I’ll spare you. The footnotes here, below the poem, are new.
The Safety Valentine –
February 10, 1989
The Poem
ODE TO A PRETTY
MUCH OKAY GIRL
Can I compare you to a slimy slug?
No way—compared to you, a slug is gross! 2
In fact, you put to shame ‘most any bug;
The caterpillar isn’t even close.
On you I think I’d rather fix my gaze
Than on a snake that’s flattened on the road. 6
I’d rather hold your hand, it’s safe to say,
Than stroke the skin of any horny toad.
And lady, I would deign to dine with you,
If going hungry were my other choice. 10
I wouldn’t mind conversing with you, too,
If forced to otherwise give up my voice.
So just relax and
feel real glad,
That I don’t think
you’re really all that bad. 14
Footnotes &
Commentary
Line 1: Can I compare
Needless to say, this sonnet is a takeoff on Shakespeare’s Sonnet #18, which begins, “Can I compare thee
to a summer’s day?” This copycat strategy is really for
the reader’s benefit, to make the whole sonnet thing seem a bit more familiar
and less daunting. I hope you’re happy.
Line 6: snake that’s flattened
Putting vivid imagery into poems is hard for me. In that regard this is one of my better
sonnets, I suppose.
Line 7: hold your hand
It’s kind of silly how my speaker assumes his reader will be
the more enthusiastic party. Who is this guy? Back when I wrote this, I was not very bold
about busting a move. I was far more
concerned about being rejected than about leading somebody on. (I’m a little better now, but that’s only
because I’m happily married and thus fairly unlikely to be rejected, except by
my cat.)
Line 8: any horny toad
That “any” is slightly silly. It’s not like one toad is grodier than
another. This is a simple case of
subjugating content to the requirements of the meter. “Horny,” on the other hand, is a fine word
choice, with the innuendo obviously intentional.
Line 9: lady
The word “lady” here would fit just fine within the milieu of
an actual Elizabethan-era sonnet, but it clearly clashes with the modern,
offhand expression “no way” in the second line.
Actually, “lady” is actually a very recent revision—i.e., just now. The original line back in 1989 was “In fact,
on you I’d rather spend my dough,” which was just so lame I revised it in February
of 1991 when I actually gave this sonnet to a female friend, pasted into an
actual safety Valentine. My revised
version was, “And ——, I’d choose to dine with you,” where obviously instead of
the dashes I had the girl’s actual name.
I’ve withheld it here to respect her privacy.
Here’s the full story:
I found myself flying solo for yet another Valentine’s Day, which wasn’t
like a big deal or anything to me, but for some reason I decided to do
something about it. So I called my
aforementioned friend. (Can a
college-aged guy have a female friend whom he’s not trying to turn into a
girlfriend? Yes, in fact. I’d started out friends with this girl, then
randomly escalated things one night, and that didn’t work out so well—call it
lack of chemistry, I guess—so we went back to being friends.) I asked if she wanted to have a non-date and
get some dinner. She said, “Well, I
already ate.” I asked what. “A cheese sandwich,” she said. I argued that that wasn’t very much food, and
anyway if she really wasn’t hungry, that was okay too—she could just watch me
eat. So then she admitted her actual
misgiving, which was that she and her roommates were having “girls’ night in,” which consisted of
staying home and bagging on all men. I
said that was pretty ridiculous and that surely the first rule of Man-Hating Girls’ Valentine Night must
be that if anybody gets a date, she’s automatically off the hook.
At this my friend relented, and I quickly put together the
Safety Valentine, with the poem and everything.
Her roommates shot daggers at me when I picked her up, and in fact I had
the sense they always hated me after that. (In fairness, they probably already hated me
before that.) She liked the poem pretty
well, I think, being a fellow English major.
One final detail about this Valentine’s non-date: after a nice dinner at the Rockridge Café my
friend randomly decided to go into the convenience store across the street and
buy a lottery ticket. She had never done
this before. To our amazement, she
won! I don’t remember the
amount—probably around $20—but every bit helps when you’re a starving
student. Besides, it set me up for the
perfect punch line to the tale: “Well,
at least one of us got lucky that
night!”
Line 12: give up my voice
This was also a revision from 1991. (I won’t even tell you the original
line—that’s how bad it was.) This bit
about giving up my voice may have been a reference (conscious or not) to
something that had happened the previous fall.
A girl I knew, for whom I really did have romantic intentions but who
lived in Arizona, came to visit me. It
ended up being a terrible visit, primarily because I was hit with this terrible
virus just before she arrived, and completely lost my voice! That made things extremely awkward, to say
the least. Looking back, the whole thing
was probably doomed anyway. She was
supposed to stay all week, through the Thanksgiving weekend, but by Tuesday we
were pretty much done with each other. I
decided, on a lark, to drive to Boulder for Thanksgiving, theorizing that if I
did this, the girl would be gone from my apartment by the time I returned on
Sunday night. In this I was not mistaken.
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