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