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  • White on White Aubade
  • John Poch (bio)

The horsehair somewhat white below his thumb,the gessoed canvas primed: the start is rough.

Malevich couldn’t get it white enough.He dabbed the brush in his titanium

the color of a white geraniumtoward an off-white that tailors might make weddings of.

The well-pleased Father setting down his Dove,so much descending on the faultless Son.

The starving polar bear devours his youngand proves that nature’s taste is tough.

The poet holds his writer’s block abovethe page, a precious emptiness, that hum.

He thinks of love’s annihilation, how oneplus one is zero, how the purists scoff

at innocence within the whitest glove,the fingernail of moon opposed to sun,

how Cupid’s blindfold, handcuffs, Match.comimpair each pair and turn us on and off.

In Russian cold, the pallor of a winter coughmight make one think of Stalin, or Mandelstam—

his epigram as harmless as the stuffof cotton in a pregnant Molotov. [End Page 1]

The way that like will never rhyme with loveis opposite the push that comes to shove.

The push has cause, like Love demanding fromthe lovers laying down their lives to come

to nothing on a bed. A sheet upona sheet can cover them before the sun. [End Page 2]

John Poch

JOHN POCH teaches at Texas Tech University. His fifth book, Texases, will be published in April 2019 by WordFarm Press.

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