From "Stoner", by John Williams

“…In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another…”

Bruce Smith

“…The try to come to [and maybe failing] is what the poem does, and what language does as it fails in attempts to be more than itself or care for another thing.”

- Bruce Smith, from an email. Ars poetica in its own right. Read this one of his poems, from “Devotions.”

How I Might Sound if I Left Myself Alone

Turning to watch you leave,
I see we must always walk toward

other loves, river of heaven 
between two office buildings.

Orphaned cloud, fish soup poppling,
book spined in the open palm. Unstoppable light.

I think it is all right.
Or do tonight, garden toad

a speaking stone,
young sound in an old heart. 

Annul the self? I float it,
a day lily in my wine. Oblivion?

I love our lives,
keeping me from it. 


- Lisa Russ Spaar

From "Tender is the Night" (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

After that they got in their car and started back toward Amiens. A thin warm rain was falling on the new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and rotten leather, abandoned six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauffeur to stop.

“There’s that girl—and she still has her wreath.”

They watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who stood uncertainly by the gate with a wreath in her hand. Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from Tennessee whom they had met on the train this morning, come from Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave. There were tears of vexation on her face.

“The War Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another name on it. I been lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.”

“Then if I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick advised her.

“You reckon that’s what I ought to do?”

“I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.”

It was growing dark and the rain was coming down harder.

She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-cab and ride back to Amiens with them.

Rosemary shed tears again when she heard of the mishap—altogether it had been a watery day, but she felt that she had learned something, though exactly what it was she did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy—one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.