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By William Doreski
(Twitter/Instagram: @doreskiW)
Limestone Country
If I had died of old age
while young enough to enjoy it,
the rain would taste of butterflies
and the country roads would tangle
among ruins left by earthquakes.
So you want to relocate me
into the deep limestone country
of France, where cave artists sketched
idealized beasts on the walls.
You want to live in a farmhouse
hewn from shallow black soil
and dusty with past generations
of sheep, cattle, goats, and women.
You’ve never been to Limoges,
Perigueux, Agonac, Égletons.
You haven’t seen raptors shade
the newborn lambs and enrage
sheep dogs trying to keep their jobs.
Yet you want to transport me
to that corrugated landscape where
others have trampled the earth
so flat it’s hard to find footing.
We’d have to rent a little car
and negotiate uneasy roads
and mutter in shy mangled French
while the autumn days collapsed
around us, grieving for our loss.
If I had died of old age
in my youth, when it mattered,
we wouldn’t argue over maps
and wouldn’t long for farm lives
too eloquent for this century.
Now everything’s recast in plastic,
and certain famous dead folks
return as holograms to mock
hauntings that should define us.
Cemetery Pond
The cemetery pond stretched taut
with its rim of weeping willows.
How often you stepped barefoot
into the mud to savor it
despite algorithms of the dead
ordered and neatly arranged.
That last time, you fell headlong
onto a gravestone and broke
a cheekbone and pair of ribs.
How did you learn such an angle
of descent? A heron dips a beak
and tugs a frog from the sheen.
A mowing machine emits
background blues of gasoline.
Such music rarely deters us,
but with you in the hospital
and me in my solitary mood
I can’t afford to think too hard
about the nineteenth century sprawled
around me, its favorite sons
and daughters put out to grass.
The pond might be a massive lens
ground flawless by summer sun.
But in another month the ice
will blind it and blunt its focus.
Where will the heron go? What
of the basking turtles you tried
to photograph by posing yourself
atop a square but rain-wet stone?
Your slip excited red and blue lights
and stretched you on a stretcher.
I’ll photograph the turtles for you.
When I visit, you can savor [stanza break]
the image of their tough old shells
trimmed with algae. In return,
let me taste a little of your pain
so I’ll know how abruptly summer
can close its valves when it wishes,
shrugging into tragic moods.
Sacco and Vanzetti Died for Our Sins
Flat industrial facades
rumple in the glare. Walking
to end of the road where forest
hems the river, I feel the eyes
behind those polished windows
watch me with detached envy.
The way factory workers watched
the murders of two payroll guards
in South Braintree in nineteen-twenty.
I’m not as dramatic. No one
violently dies this afternoon,
warm October light too cunning
to allow another miscarriage
of justice to reshape our lives.
With honest work left behind,
I step from the pavement and enter
the shade of oak and beech thriving
in low ground. The river smirks
in its gully, warping along
without regarding formalities.
Sacco and Vanzetti died
for our sins, with so many others.
The path along the river
leads north to the college where
I labored a lifetime in vain.
Or south to ruined paper mills
basking in their spent pollution.
Back in the industrial park,
I walk like an innocent man,
the crimes of the last hundred years
resounding like hammered brass
to honor my present tense.
White Spider
A white spider webbed on a pane
shocks me backward sixty years
to a shed behind the general store
where prowling for scraps I touch
silk and a spider assays me
as barely possible prey.
Subverted by this encounter,
I assumed a lifetime of fright.
Even the tiptoe of fliesf endorsed
prongs of imaginary toxins.
I’d awaken in a shrivel of damp
and cling to the lip of a dream
until daylight stunned me sober.
The white spider of this morning
excites no such delirium.
It looks utile as a pocket tool,
a device with pliers, screwdriver,
knife blade, awl, and nail file.
Sixty years ago, I weighed enough
to sink at the pool and struggle
to dogpaddle back to the shallows.
I always felt over my head—
the spider fear teasing my nerves
so water couldn’t relax me.
Those summers flattened into pages
of grammar school textbooks no one
loved or even respected.
Now I’m tough enough to wish
this pale spider happy hunting.
Its evil eye is ornamental,
and its many legs no longer
seem excessive. I’ll leave that pane
unswept, unwashed until frost drives
the spider into winter quarters,
where it will dream tiny meat-dreams
that will merge themselves with mine.
Orphic August Landscape
Spongy boletus mushrooms
gather around a pine stump
like mourners at a funeral pyre.
Although they’re edible enough,
I’m not tempted to claim them—
their poise and attentive look
too poignant for me to disturb.
The brook rattling down from hills
the color of antique jewelry
expresses itself without shame.
Insects with terrible antennae
creep up and down the tree trunks.
The last landscape Orpheus saw
before descending into Hades
looked much like this one but
trimmed with belief in the gods.
If I could conjure up such faith
I could decipher the stony voice
of the brook and understand
why following it to its source
high on a slope with a distant
view of Boston would answer
questions I haven’t learned to ask.
I would also know why the mushrooms
ring the stump, why wispy threads
of their mycelia have burrowed
here and not in the richer soil
beside the brook. The mushrooms
are only the fruit of this effort.
But like Orpheus they linger
atop a gloomy underground
in which their great dreams fester.
If I believed, I’d learn why I should [stanza break]
or shouldn’t enter this dark,
the crackle of the running brook
a self-refreshing chorus.
About the Author:
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities.
His most recent book of poetry is Dogs Don’t Care (2022).
His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.
You can keep with him, on his site: williamdoreski.blogspot.com.
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