by Bruce Whiteman

“Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.”
— Wallace Stevens

Do women care for men who cry? A splash
of sunlight in silent January is enough
to bring on tears, a child at risk, a taut,
cruel feeling that all feeling equals

the fear of death at heart, the fear of
messing up and being dead,
inconsolable again. The stain
is never coming out, Ms Faux Semblant,

your deepest wish is deeply yours.
The grand shillyshally of our final
days is closer now, chilly death and its
dark refrigeration, a

boorish finger at its lips.
Weep for what’s been sullied,
she won’t. What she’s wrought
she’s chillingly game to cheer at.

I don’t know if women care
for men who cry. Ask? I’d never dare.

by Bruce Whiteman

The barometer recalculates and now
dark winter’s back, the equinox three weeks since.
The ewes are still not up to giving birth.
The farmyard cat seeks warmth and rarely walks abroad.

Lettuce grows under heat lamps far from sight.
A small brown calf, conceived out of season
by a frisky bull who ran amuck and had his luck
with Elsie, struggles to stand amid the frozen mud.

The pigs take shelter underneath the hay.
Their bliss is unmistakable. The grave and
elephantine sow is unmoving, lying on her
side and crumpled like a castoff winter coat,

yet seemingly glad for life and farrow.
No human eye however tired or
wretched in the endless cold can fail
to see that life goes on despite our

private gloom, and poetry can help deploy
whatever of it’s needed to stay alive.
It restitutes incomparable companions,
a chicken or the longing, devoted heart.

by Bruce Whiteman

“The true idea leads to grain and groundnuts.” Ezra Pound, 1941

The fading late October sun
illuminates a barely tree. Polychrome
leaves are everywhere, crowds
in corners, tidal waves falling

over battered houses, lonely
singles accidentally powered
into halls and foyers, dragged
underfoot to who knows where,

gone. The sun will soon be gone
as well, as darkening cold moves in,
winter and its grim psychosis.
On an ancient August afternoon

it seemed far–fetched, like Ezra pushing
peanut–butter on his friends in Rome
and elsewhere, hoarfrost on a
bathroom window, snow in a gulch

where animals go to die, abundant.
It passes belief but is no joke.
Stubble in the fields and rumbustious
squirrels and the wretchedness to come.

by Andy Weaver

Greek philosophers,
acutely aware that the
blazing intensities of
the occasion can be only
faintly reproduced in
writing, sang that a man who is
dying, shot by an arrow,
will scream the words
of love as arrows, as bolts
wounding the soul, and so
love is the word
that parts the lips
love is the tongue
that parts the lips
pushing its way
as carefully as the arrow
pierces the skin of the heart?
Aye, there’s the
old bullshit, the masculinist
driving its willy nilly through
everything standing in its way.
Such a poor, old, tired, sawhorse.
Love is not the arrows and throw
away the ancient Greeks who say so.
Love does not cleave, love does not
part, I have to believe that love does nothing
so violent. Look closely. Love was never
the arrow, it was the red blood rushing
to the wound, working from the instant
its instant pull together, a knitting of cleaved,
of the asunder, of the parted. It is that under
which we lulled and weaved, it is the warp
and the weft, the balm of the reft, the uncleft.
It is the centripetal force, the only tether. And so
this spin undoes the fling apart. And so this spin
keeps the atoms twirling, the molecules whirling,
the fingerprints whorling, the suns burning,
the galaxies churning. It is no wonder, then,
that some say it sets our heads a–spinning, for
it is a force that can make a world go round.
As it involves transition, transliteration, the
transposition of energy, love should be the
invisible synergy of human communication,
an activity that defines the creation of language,
the suggestion of a call to assess the slippage
or damage, perhaps through the application
of a formula involving pi or in the airy kiss
which involves Ra and invokes the airborne
ritual played out as a game neither delineated
nor ineffable — the godpage on which the godtext
forms the beloved’s eye, a demanding of long
and close observation, bound to the infinite
project of the insatiability of desire and the brevity
of the experience of knowing. Just so, there was
a real, historical Faust, though the facts of his life
do not tell us Faust as much as our sympathy
for his anguish, as precious to us as those tales
of German tradesmen burned at the stake in France
for possessing the mysterious and terrifying
objects we understand now as printed books.
Just so, love is a creature only in the ancient sense
of the word as purely theological, applicable only
to a supreme deity whose name we dare not write,
and it evolves with no end point, no summation
or synopsis. It does not resolve. Perhaps I can only
explain this by saying that if you are one of three
anarchists in Moose Jaw then you’re going to be
awfully lonely right now, or that (while love is in no
way to be confused with its struggles) to lift love
out of its struggles would be to betray it.
In the core of my being the hearts of three others
have encentred and, so, expropriate in advance
every sameness my body possesses. Your hearts
pump my blood, my mind, at its best, thinks
your thoughts, our lungs breathe the same air.
You are we, I am us. We are being with, a just
singular plural being, that which we try so hard
to deny in the emancipatory narrative of the free
individual, even while we write that story
as the story of hell. Still, I know not
what we are but we are not love, any more than
the pieces of string are the knot — yet, like the string,
the knotting of love shapes us to such an admeasurement
that we are not ourselves without it. So some will say
we have built large walls while others argue we have made
many and strong hammers. Put otherly, how can we conscionly
dream representations of the absolute beauty
of the future, we creatures of our hemispheric faults?
                                                                                                  If
even Villon has yet to find the snows of yesteryear I do not
like our chances in the future. Still, love, like a word,
is an untiring messenger, eternally dragging its weight,
changing nothing except the content and meaning
of its message, the way a single page in a book might
recall with a dazzling un–clarity the two minutes one
morning centuries ago of its being opened to the sun shining
through a train window as it speeds somewhere, anywhere,
far beyond even the book’s knowing, a growing dawn
of recognition as the leaf before it falls to the left, a stilled
moment passing quickly until the licked finger draws along
its edge and all illumination dims then fades totally, to be
replaced by the never–before–understood–to–be–calming
touch of recto to verso, verso to recto. The book closes,
yet the buzz of its words still collects pollen in the mind
of the reader. Such an impassioned regard for and address
to the world is most commensurable to the beloveds;
aesthetic discovery is congruent with social discovery,
new ways of loving make new ways of being, and, as love
is a preeminently social medium, so the lover has no irreducible,
ahistoric, unmediated, singular, kernel identity. Love by its nature
cannot be isolated, autonomous, rarified, or pure; it is contamination
after cross–contamination, not the fever but the infection.