Robert Creeley famously equivocates.  In “The Whip,” he vacillates between a woman in his bed and a woman on the roof, a current lover and a potential or former. Creeley injects his printed poems with vacillation through heavy enjambment: “addressed myself to in / a fit she / returned.  That / encompasses it.  But now I was / lonely.”  He indicates the moment he requires to contemplate his word choice with the line break.  Read aloud, these momentary deliberations fragment a straightforward narrative, as if Creeley is a close friend stammering through a confession of his predicament for the first time.  His reading of “For Love,” conveys the same feeling, as he tries to dictate a love poem on the spot, but constantly scratches his head and eyes the floor and never knows what to say.  “If the moon did not… / no, if you did not / I wouldn’t either, but / what would I not / do.”  Creeley speaks candidly, sometimes his voice appears close to tears when he cannot decide, as if he didn’t have a finished poem on a podium to read.

That line crushes the chest, the ribs, the poor shivering ribs on Anyuta’s own body, that the medical student studies anatomy upon. As he taps and draws w/ charcoal on her, as she shivers & turns blue w/ cold, we realize that she is the thinker, the planner. While she may never have a beautiful life like the men she dwells w/ & helps, she @ least plays a part in their becoming. And, in that way, she may be beautiful.

While Andrei Andreich, who writes this note to the church, is considered the village intellectual, he fails to see any truths beyond the tangible. Therefore, he fails at understanding, grasping the essence of, human life, religion, and his artistic and passionate daughter…the harlot (& deceased) Maria. And, precisely because he cannot see, Andrei misses the magical, religious moment he seems to have been waiting for all his life – the moment when the smoke of the censer mixes w/ one slanting ray of sunlight in the lifeless church, appearing almost to be his daughter’s soul. And, what does she do, rushing out the window? She shuns him right back.

“‘Suppose they issued a decree that I absolutely had to live with you, I’d either burn down the cottage or lay hands on myself.’”

We learn that the woman, Pelageya, who surprises the huntsman at the opening of the story, portends death prior to discovering that she is his wife of twelve years. She startles him, standing, “pale-faced […] w/ a sickle in her hand.” But we gradually learn that he is the cruel one, slowly killing her through neglect when not beating her, and his actions, casual and nonchalant, reveal that he doesn’t care at all. “Love…” Yegor mutters, scratching his arm. “There can’t be any love.”

In the above piece, a second sentence adds the surprising element, add’l beauty and truth. It is necessary. Almost as necessary as the story reveals that “small fry,” people like Nevyrazimov, the dispensable, are in the world. By focusing on the poverty of objects and sensory info that surrounds his protagonist (& us, the readers) in juxtaposition to the objects of memory he longs for, Checkhov place us all in the body of a squished cockroach.