William Doreski
Peterborough, USA
William Doreski has published
three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work
has appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught at
Emerson College, Goddard College, Boston University, and Keene State
College. His most recent books are Water Music and Train
to Providence.
Two Poems -
Arcadia in Plague -
Sheltering in Ourselves
Completed 20th April 2020.
Arcadia in Plague
To conceal the latest dread,
we mask ourselves in public.
It doesn’t help. Churches tilt
away from us, storefronts blind
their facades with heavy plywood,
our close friends estrange themselves
behind masks as crude as ours.
Ben Jonson thought that masques
rendered allegories thick enough
to spoon-feed finicky royalty.
His characters didn’t need faces
but relied on song and gesture
to convey their metaphysics.
We don’t sing because masks stifle
even the wispiest whispers.
We don’t gesture large gestures
because we learned from Chaplin
how insistent mime can seem.
The streets fold in on themselves
like old-fashioned aerograms.
Men climb out of pickup trucks
with their masked faces sweating.
Maybe we’re all ripening toward
some fecund but final harvest.
We enter the only grocery store
that still stocks living fruit.
Oranges, lemons, a cantaloupe.
What if these are shrunken heads
of those who’ve died of boredom,
waiting for the plague to catch up?
We fill our baskets and pretend
the sky pressing at the window
is merely friendly and curious.
The whole checkout line shudders
like a runover snake. The great
collective masque absorbs us
into settings so anonymous
no one bothers
forwarding mail.
Poem completed 22nd April 2020
Sheltering in Ourselves
The wind is reshaping itself
to avoid fresh expectations.
Snow dishevels the scenery
that had planned a million
flowers.
Only April, but already birds
have scouted their brittle
estates,
already hundreds of chipmunks
have doggedly scoured the
ground.
I’m happy to lie late in bed,
but you want to resurrect
antique
flavors, boiling them on
ranges
fueled by gas formed
underground
before humans evolved. You
want
to toss enormous salads
a brontosaurus might admire.
This reiteration of foodstuffs
reacts to a mid-spring
snowstorm
as reagents respond to acids.
Such a descant of the spirit
usually occurs near the
solstice,
when heat and thunder mingle
to thump out musical metaphors
as we shelter in ourselves.
Today’s already awash in
sighs.
The political news shocks us,
the bad actors lost in their
roles.
The rise in sea level
persists,
eroding properties that once
we coveted for long horizons.
Now we’d rather lose
perspective
than see how the vanishing
point
has cuddled up to our estate.
You’re brewing potables that
reek
of vinegar strong enough to
kill
the most persistent microbes.
The morning looks too humble
to sustain our mutual worries,
so let’s step outside in the
snow
and wind and lie down and
relax
in the season’s last
refurbishing.