Bruce Whitacre | Vert. Verlaine. Vérité.

Vert. Verlaine. Vérité.

A toast to an era corked in a verdant bottle
The chemical the geniuses lacked
The elixir that rescued us from the century that believed
Science could eventually grind a lens
To see and fix us all
The solution that fueled those card-ripping anarchists
Hallucinators, fornicators, foul-mouthed shooters of lovers
Hairy rebels all, those sacred monsters of the so-called Belle Époque,
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Manet, Verlaine,
Especially Verlaine, who made language dance, swoon, pant, rut
Under the clair de lune.

There he sits in his corner at the Café François, our Verlaine.
His woolly head swirls in the smoky mirror.
His failing liver is cushioned against the upholstered bench.
The glass, the water, the cube of sugar,
The bottle of the bitter muse herself
La mère absinthe
Dribbles over the sweet.
Savor the wormwood incitement.
Let him swoon and recline
As chemistry launches the journey that never ended,
Free of nuts and bolts, steam engines, hygiene,
Unplugged. Staked to tribal rites,
Probing the thighs of the verdigris goddess.

Vert. Verlaine. Vérité.

He scribbles the treasures retrieved, the future revealed:
Our green genie rubbed from a bottle in a Paris boîte, our “now”.
We still scavenge the jade dregs of those glasses
For the ghosts of the dreams snatched from the machine
That echo still in the downing.

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Bruce E. Whitacre's work has appeared in Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, and North of Oxford. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is an activist and advocate for the arts and social justice. He lives in Forest Hills, Queens.