David Solway is the author of many books of poetry including the award-winning Modern Marriage, Bedrock, Chess Pieces, and Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis. A new collection, The Lover's Progress, will be appearing in the fall. Among his prose publications, Random Walks was a finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and his most recent work, The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods, was released by McGill-Queen's in 2001. He publishes regularly in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, The Sewanee Review, Books in Canada and Canadian Notes & Queries and was appointed poet-in-residence at Concordia University.

The Mastlight It blazed so starkly what else could it be but Venus, the stars' bright obscurity that, like the moon, cobbled the sea with light. Old Velikovsky surely got it right: Venus, spewed from Jupiter's burning mass, launched at once a gravity war with Mars, banking the earth into a side pocket, until, an illustrious comet, it turned the sun into a carbide lamp - thus it must have happened (pace Lucretius). How else explain that chrome intensity, that cold fire burning a hole in the sky, a star that weaves a shadow from whole cloth? The moon, beside it, fizzled like a moth. Or were the ancients right? This radiant being was Love herself or what Love meant to be mistaken for - the lucid point round which our new-created shadows dance, the torch that kindles vision into trance. And so I gazed, too deeply moved to move, like any sentimentalist, at Love. And as I stood and gawked, heard someone cough. And then the boat weighed anchor and sailed off. Hans Grunewald Hans Grunewald, blessed is your name. Forgive us our incessant grumbling and protesting to Town Hall and Council and to the Town Engineer, Trail Grubert, your companion at golf, for your remiss and slovenly ways, and for insulting my wife who found your methods and your manners lacking. For it is you who gives us our daily clearing and removes the snow in heaps even if you have destroyed the fence we erected last summer at considerable expense. It is you who brings us our morning salt that makes the dog limp on bleeding paws and eats into the asphalt. It is you who sprinkles sand upon the snow and the salt turning it all to slush that softens and corrodes our boots. It is you who makes the impassable sometimes passable and sometimes even more impassable as the whim takes you seated high in the cab of your snowplough, indifferent to the fate of householders. Hans Grunewald, snug in your corpulent immunities, may you continue to flourish on the taxes we render the municipality and send your friend, Trail Grubert, to salve our hurts and resentments, but know there is room for improvement in your methods as there is in your manners. Noboru Wataya           for Haruki Murakami Noboru Wataya where are you? Did the winder-up forget to wind your spring? Noboru Wataya when are you more than puppet or shadow? Do you ever stir on your own? Noboru Wataya what are you? Did the automaton-maker botch your ratchets and chucks? Noboru Wataya why are you unable to move beyond seeming? Noboru Wataya who are you? Are you miscarriage of darkness or just Noboru Wataya? Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Man with a Hat 1. In the newspaper photo, he was one of thirteen who "plunged to their deaths" in the basket of a hot air balloon. 2. A collection of dots, black, gray, yielding little resolution except in the case of the figure with the hat. 3. So there were thirteen. Presumably, nobody stopped to count at the embarkation stall. 4. Twelve as one humped blur on the viewfinder's left. On the right a reasonably clear shape wearing an Aussie hat. 5. The man with the hat saw the photographer's balloon drifting toward him, felt a sudden rush of invisible wings. 6. The sky was a cloudless, unrifted blue. The sky was broken with cirrus. 7. To write about a man with a hat in the basket of a hot air balloon who "plunged to his death" in Alice Springs is ridiculous. To be in that basket is also ridiculous. 8. The man with the hat intrigues me since there is only one discernible shape which can be described, approximately, as a man wearing a hat. 9. If there are thirteen ways of looking at anything, there is only one way of being it. 10. Mercury oxide. A flock of crumpled black birds fixed like Roman numerals. An obvious, tasteless joke. In any case, the utter lack of anything resembling dignity. 11. You are in the basket looking at the camera, wearing a Crocodile Dundee hat, on the very point of raising your hand. 12. The stanzas of this poem, including this one, are lumped together like featureless aperçus. Except for the next. 13. A yellow sunbrella affixed to the deck turns languidly in the wind. 'The Red Wheelbarrow' so much depends upon The Red Wheel barrow scored with black markings inside the white margins. Portrait: English Department He complains of teaching, its claustral wars, ingrown toenails of academic minds; condemns the insecurity, and jeers at a wasteland full of Waste Lands. "This business of book, thesis, lecture - it's like screwing the dead with icicles." Damns the necrophiles of literature pacing their offices like cells. Lately he has little to say, his toes curl up, he's been notified of tenure. When it comes to the cynics, I suppose there's no cure like a sinecure.