WILLIAM DORESKI - POEMS

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.
​

​Your Feckless Smile

​Your smile detached and flitted off.
We search in the Luxembourg Garden,
the Tuileries, the cafes along
Boulevard Montparnasse. You fear
it has adhered to German tourists
or smeared the eloquent stained glass
of Saint-Chapelle. I worry
that it has disgraced itself drunk
at an embassy party where
the stuffing comes out of shirts.
 
Why can’t you discipline it?
To avoid frightening the world
I never smile. No one expects
my approval, no one invites me
to galas where the champagne flows,
no one greets me gladly in the street.
My expression avoids extremes
so I never have to explain them.
 
Isn’t this why we live in Paris
with the Seine in suicidal gloom
the cathedral shelled by fire,
terrorists gunning down their critics?
No sunny Impressionist scenes
for us. If you hadn’t loosed your smile
we would be too anonymous
to suffer existential angst,
our bodies so secret that even
naked we’d be invisible.
 
The alerted gendarmery searches
alleys, bistros, cafes, parking lots
in the dusty yellow suburbs
where rumors froth with lechery.
Next time refrain from flirting
with the world. It doesn’t flirt back
but takes what it wants with a sneer,
leaving its best friends toothless
and sopping up muck through a straw.
 

​McQuillan’s Last Few Notes  

​Winter thaw exhorts the river
to rise and claim our whole village.
We and the river got along
for the last hundred years but
political notions have shifted
to the right of that white pine looming
over the house where Bob McQuillan
died while banging his piano. 
We still hear his last few notes
 
tinkling like rats rattling trash
at the landfill. The river sighs,
dreaming of the Mississippi,
the Nile, the Volga, the Amazon
French-kissing the naked sea.
We also have spiked our ambitions,
settling for a pittance while stones
crack open to release the ghosts
fossilized at the planet’s birth.
 
What happens when the universe
goes blank in a fit of entropy?
A painless erasure, we’re sure--
no more climate to muddle us,
no more spirit to corral.
We share our usual tall cup
of coffee and plan a speechless day
of chores, ending with moonlight
smoothing every frozen surface.
 
We agree that winter’s easy
if expensive, fuel depletion
and psychic distress managed
the way we manage everything
that ruffles our mossy coifs.
McQuillan left no ghost to play
his folky little compositions,
but his final struck notes linger
to domesticate the river’s flow.

Non-Euclidean Figures
​

Non-Euclidean Figures 
Our talk becomes angular
after midnight. Simplify,
you urge. Complicate, I say.
Your own life is an example.
Your husband shed you because
his ancestral pride rejected
your precious Easter-egg outlook.
Biracial, your child braced herself
against the world but dizzied
with the worst case of vertigo
her doctors had ever seen.
 
You want moral authority
to prevail over naked gunfire,
and so do I. But the distance
we’ve traveled has warped us into
non-Euclidean figures
that refuse to mate with others
even under terrible pressure.
We talk because we must, our minds
clenched with anger we could share
without inflection if we chose.
We don’t choose, deadlocked in pride.
 
Tomorrow I’ll stand on the highway
with my Black Lives Matter sign
while you compress inside yourself
and worry about your daughter
and her intractable poverty
established a thousand miles away.
Maybe we’ll meet at day’s end,
the winter dusk a slash of tissue,
and whisper almost inaudibly
of people and places we’ve loved,
our tempers cooled almost enough
to handle without scarring us.

 

A Common Language

​All the guitars are asleep
but the houseplants murmur
in a green soprano chorus.
New Year’s Eve. We slip under
the bedclothes to watch TV,
a murder mystery unfolding
in gestures we’ve seen before.
 
Everyone knows who murders
whom and why. It happens over
and over, dispersing police
over rural English countryside
we envy for its musculature,
toned by centuries of farm life
so that the pigs and cows smile
with resigned and earthy humor.
 
After the crime has solved itself
 I’ll stay up late reading about
Wittgenstein teasing the dons
of Cambridge with his assertions
about the single common language
and how it might learn to suffice.
 
That notion of a common language
haunted the women’s movement
of the Seventies when we entered
graduate school with the rain
dripping from our cheap dark clothes.
 
We haven’t played the guitars
for years, so they sleep soundly.
Their strings have slackened but
there’s no point in tormenting them
into tunings of imperfect pitch.
 
Maybe tomorrow, the new year,
with a refreshed atmosphere
will render us musical again.
Let’s listen hard for that hum
of celestial pitch pipe, an e-flat
even police detectives hear
when they cross-examine silence
with their faun-like pointed ears.

​A Folk Tale

​Embossed in this morning’s snow,
tracks of long-dead folksingers
ramble from garden to forest.
If we followed, we’d hear snatches
of smarmy English ballads
about maidens flaunting rubbery
bosoms at Redcoats prowling
the countryside for ne’er-do-wells
of handsome and puckish mien.
 
You admired this acoustical mode,
the hollow sound of antiquity,
while I envied rock ‘n’ rollers
with that full electric swagger.
These are your sort of characters,
both singers and subjects; so why
don’t I stay home and make tea
while you slog through the shadows
of leafless trees and learn exactly
which late group has trespassed?
 
Don’t expect an outdoor concert
warmed over from the LP era
when we huddled in our bedrooms
with suitcase phonographs playing
softly in winsome summer nights.
Deep in the woods you’ll hear
guitar strings snap and crackle.
You’ll find the snow rumpled and pink
with blood smears and smutted with
tatters of rotten old clothing.                                         
 
You’ll come home convinced of nothing,
your musical mood deflated;
but I’ll have brewed your herbal tea
and you’ll warm yourself describing
the Monterey Folk Festival
with the mist off the Pacific
lending a ghost edge to the music,
assuring you it would last.