  The quark Dyson-Schwinger equation and meson Bethe-Salpeter equation are
studied in a truncation scheme that extends the rainbow-ladder approximation
such that, in the chiral limit, the isovector, pseudoscalar meson remains
massless. Quark-quark (diquark) correlations, which are bound in rainbow-ladder
approximation, are destabilised by repulsive contributions that only appear at
higher order in the Bethe-Salpeter kernel. The net effect of higher order terms
on the meson bound-state masses is small.
