Intimate Letters: The Invisible World Is in Decline, Book VII - Softcover

Whiteman, Bruce

9781770412125: Intimate Letters: The Invisible World Is in Decline, Book VII

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770412123 ISBN 13: 9781770412125

Publisher: a misFit book, 2014

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Intimate Letters comprises the seventh book of an ongoing long poem in prose called The Invisible World Is in Decline. Its title borrows from a string quartet by Leoš J�naček, a profoundly emotional piece written late in the composer’s life when he had fallen in love with a younger woman. It also points towards the intimacy of letters themselves, the visible pieces that make up language. This collection begins with love poems, then moves to a section (“Wretched in This Alone”) dominated by loss. The “Invisible Ghazals” which follow take language and emotions more deeply into a sense of dispossession, a landscape of the heart characterized by feeling unmoored. “Desire,” the final poem, and the only piece in conventional poetic lines, attempts to rescue the heart from bleakness by proposing that passion does survive even the most difficult and demanding experiences, and “runs through our days like / music.”

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About the Author

Bruce Whiteman was born in 1952. He has published many books of poetry and cultural criticism and is well known as a book reviewer. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Intimate Letters

The Invisible World is in Decline, Book VII

By Bruce Whiteman

ECW PRESS

CHAPTER 1

INTIMATE LETTERS

IN THE MAGIC CIRCLE OF NIGHT

"... im Zauberkreis der Nacht" — Hermann Hesse

Mountains ring paradise. The sun is still on its tether. Sloughed roof tile in a red clay pile.

Late afternoon light and wind ripple the pool water. Leaves high in the air blow left and right. A pigeon plummets like an arrow onto a stone.

Immigrant palms flex their green muscles in the bright air. Black shadows come and go. The cat darts self-consciously at a lark.

All directions of the compass congregate in a small circle at the tip of a peaked roof. The air bites its own tail up there. The weathercock is still.

The incontrovertible logic of night is still far off. It lies in a dusty unlit corner where the wind and the sunlight are moot. It is a hummingbird's tongue, barely noticeable.

Something unseen chitters high in a tree. The wind picks up and muffles its odd vibrato. Traffic noises counterpoint that voice.

Your dress lies in a red circle on the grass. Bees hover over it, glad for colour. A single mourning dove sits like a whole note on the telephone wire above.

Stones ring a bottlebrush tree. Two cactuses rise like pillars in the grass. Almost everything is green in the yellow light.

The desert outside these greeny walls is stark. Dark stones and pallid sand stand endlessly repeated into out of sight. Slight chance of any redemptive moment.

Human objects intervene. A brown chair with three slats at back sits slack at a table. Lime pieces float in a plastic glass.

A spindly tree rises out of the back patio. Your splayed body sleeps quietly on the bed. Out of doors, a slate table sits empty.

Night descends finally as the elliptical sunlight fades. The vibrissae on the trees go still. The room fills with soft grey air.

The desert night is old, cold, silent now that all the planes are grounded. Now is not the proper time of month for moonlight. The cat skulks by, hunting now for fellow tetrapods.

The desert night surrounds this place with an intimate clasp. Lights like eyelids open up and barely penetrate the dark. The arc of "nothing there" creeps out from under trees.

The desert night inspires faith in stones for comfort. They are hard things, immovable, not prone to deception. They go dark before the dying light obtunds.

The desert night envelops every passing car. Their dust and ruddy lights are fast wiped clean. They fade from sight in no time flat.

Shadows grow like grey chalk on the orange wall. They are a second reflection, evolving and elusive like a poem. They pulse and sway and finally are erased.

Shadows mass and quiver behind seven tall trees. No less real than green fronds, they shiver and fade at dusk. A single streetlight casts its listless pall.

The wind picks up at five o'clock. Everything not near to the ground despairs and cranes its neck to live. Darkness lies around that special corner.

It is the wind brings the magic circle of night. Lovers bide their time and wait amidst piled blankets and feathered berms. Love is enough whether they sleep for a while or not.

OF YOUR SCENTS AND BIRDSONG

"... von deinem Duft und Vogelsang"

— Hermann Hesse

Away from soap your hair smells deep with the promise of skin, the place where our bodies abandon their silent grief and containment and spill out onto each other.

Love wants to live at the cutting-edge where light and hair decla

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