Jim Larwill

Canadian Shield Chapbooks I.

 

                   I WHISPER LOVE

 

 

I whisper love into your ear with the cool breath of spring as nestling feathers tickle your neck.

 

I whisper love with a forked tongue and cold blooded words that slice like a razor at the trunk of a tree, carving the bark away bit by bit by bit in the hope of freeing you with a heart.

 

I whisper love as I crawl out of my skin only to tie it in a rubbing knot before spinning it down the drain.

 

 

 

I whisper love when a small hand pulls my finger and I look down into the eyes of a child holding a plastic skeleton, her body little more than a battle ground for cancer and chemotherapy, her Halloween smile mocking death and my own fear of life.

 

I whisper love past the velvet leaves of your naked seeing self with a prayer that forces its way into your womb where I hope to bind one love with another.

 

I whisper love across the graveyards of children into the dry eyes of grieving mothers who stand upon a world without divinity.

 

 

 

I whisper love in the late night as I read the sonnets of Shakespeare, my tears punctuating his vain hope to resurrect his son with words as I slap the face of intellectuals who mediate poets in the same way scientists mediate the word of God.

I whisper love as I walk across a bloodless pond where you discover the twisted and dismembered arteries of a stump sinking deeper and deeper into the willowed mud.

I whisper love as I think of Mayakovsky and his love for Lili Brik and how that love turned into a bullet that in an instant ate through his heart, this same worm that now daily chews its way deeper and deeper into the frozen wood of my chest.

 

 

I whisper love now knowing that the vibrations of my own shouting voice tore the leaves from the trees and covered the world in a blanket of white regrets.

 

I whisper love in the hope that all I have preserved with ice and anger will one day thaw and will bloom into the light again.

 

I whisper love when I run my finger over the fruit of your decaying lips, their shape seeming to explain all of my life and future existence.

 

I whisper love when my semen becomes lost and confused, attacked in the dark by the predator words lying deep in the virile crevices of our fleshy membranes.

 

 

 

I whisper love to you my love in all the silent cells of your body, my melting marrow, an empty caress of wrinkles where I carve an epitaph with the fiction of my peeling skin, as small flakes are swallowed into the termination of a puffing wind.