On today's theme, about spending time

In honor of the day, a favorite love poem by Richard Wilbur. All our loves flow from the Holy Trinity -- Happy Valentine's Day! 

 

A Late Aubade

You could be sitting now in a carrel

Turning some liver-spotted page,

Or rising in an elevator-cage

Toward Ladies’ Apparel.

You could be planting a raucous bed

Of salvia, in rubber gloves,

Or lunching through a screed of someone’s loves

With pitying head,

Or making some unhappy setter

Heel, or listening to bleak

Lecture on Schoenberg’s serial technique.

Isn’t this better?

Think of all the time you are not

Wasting, and would not care to waste,

Such things, thank God, not being to your taste.

Think what a lot

Of time, by woman’s reckoning,

You’ve saved, and so may spend on this,

You who had rather lie in bed and kiss

Than anything.

It’s almost noon, you say? If so,

Time flies, and I need not rehearse

The rosebuds-theme of centuries of verse.

If you must go,

Wait for a while, then slip downstairs

And bring us up some chilled white wine,

And some blue cheese, and crackers, and some fine

Ruddy-skinned pears.

--Richard Wilbur