Hardly a Love Poem
Three inches of rain. Required
are kisses so airtight the stink
and sulfur of electric discharge
can’t penetrate. Our privacy
in this office four stories up
seems biblical, the stuff of myth.
The rain’s a tsunami, a wall
of water thick enough to muffle
the cries of embryos brewing
in the dark, the whispers of atoms
plotting to split in public.
These powerful, reluctant kisses,
which no scholar will ever parse,
retain their form and function
long after lips that lavish them
return to the business of speech.
Can we maintain such discreet
posture in the naked fact
of weather? Our bodies cringe
and wring like a pair of sponges,
which increases our adhesion.
The rain wants to crush the building
and claim us for its collection
of spare parts. Then our absence
would retain the form of kisses
and in memoriam our colleagues
would embrace but would fake it.
We’re better at this pretense
than they are. These private kisses,
although invisible, linger like
smoke rings. Only certain
instruments can detect them.
But we might as well confess
wasting these kisses on each other,
our mutual dislike impersonal
as weather itself, our privacy
and consequent frightened embrace
disasters we’ll surely survive.
Three inches of rain. Required
are kisses so airtight the stink
and sulfur of electric discharge
can’t penetrate. Our privacy
in this office four stories up
seems biblical, the stuff of myth.
The rain’s a tsunami, a wall
of water thick enough to muffle
the cries of embryos brewing
in the dark, the whispers of atoms
plotting to split in public.
These powerful, reluctant kisses,
which no scholar will ever parse,
retain their form and function
long after lips that lavish them
return to the business of speech.
Can we maintain such discreet
posture in the naked fact
of weather? Our bodies cringe
and wring like a pair of sponges,
which increases our adhesion.
The rain wants to crush the building
and claim us for its collection
of spare parts. Then our absence
would retain the form of kisses
and in memoriam our colleagues
would embrace but would fake it.
We’re better at this pretense
than they are. These private kisses,
although invisible, linger like
smoke rings. Only certain
instruments can detect them.
But we might as well confess
wasting these kisses on each other,
our mutual dislike impersonal
as weather itself, our privacy
and consequent frightened embrace
disasters we’ll surely survive.
William Doreski
William Doreski’s most recent collection of poetry is Another Ice Age (2007). He has published three critical studies, including
Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts
Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural
Bridge. http://williamdoreski.blogspot.com
Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts
Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural
Bridge. http://williamdoreski.blogspot.com
Browsing the Marsh
Blackbirds animate the heat,
their song so angular it hurts
to hear it. Browsing the marsh
I name kingbirds, an oriole,
fox sparrow and two green herons.
The smell of the water’s heavy
and brown as an old canvas.
One day fishing with my father
I tumbled into the river,
only a foot deep, and tasted
a lifetime of fish and insect.
My father scolded me for leaning
too far to untangle my line
but secretly laughed at my rue.
Meanwhile people are drowning.
Three children in a whitewater
Vermont stream, one in Hillsboro,
a child caught somehow on a rock,
two drunken fishermen toppled
from a bass boat on Winnesquam Lake.
The blackbirds rehearse and rehearse
but never perfect their song,
which is always slightly too sharp.
The oriole shames them with lyric
few birds can match. The sparrows
and kingbirds try, while the herons,
fishing on one leg, don’t care.
My drowning wasn’t the real thing,
but the look on my father’s face,
a muddle of stern and satire,
remains fixed in memory,
and the sultry damp of marsh swirls
in bug-fevered air like outrage,
wit, or praise: none of which
make sense unless you’ve been there,
tasting the brown taste all over.
Blackbirds animate the heat,
their song so angular it hurts
to hear it. Browsing the marsh
I name kingbirds, an oriole,
fox sparrow and two green herons.
The smell of the water’s heavy
and brown as an old canvas.
One day fishing with my father
I tumbled into the river,
only a foot deep, and tasted
a lifetime of fish and insect.
My father scolded me for leaning
too far to untangle my line
but secretly laughed at my rue.
Meanwhile people are drowning.
Three children in a whitewater
Vermont stream, one in Hillsboro,
a child caught somehow on a rock,
two drunken fishermen toppled
from a bass boat on Winnesquam Lake.
The blackbirds rehearse and rehearse
but never perfect their song,
which is always slightly too sharp.
The oriole shames them with lyric
few birds can match. The sparrows
and kingbirds try, while the herons,
fishing on one leg, don’t care.
My drowning wasn’t the real thing,
but the look on my father’s face,
a muddle of stern and satire,
remains fixed in memory,
and the sultry damp of marsh swirls
in bug-fevered air like outrage,
wit, or praise: none of which
make sense unless you’ve been there,
tasting the brown taste all over.
Brain Truss
The way landscapes are folding
into each other requires
the kinetic mental support
of a brain truss to comprehend.
China and India, mountains
of sawtoothed, feverish rock,
fold into wads of money thick
as tectonic plates. Europe
with gothic and Romanesque
churches converted to villas
for the stuporous rich folds
its national boundaries and forms
a density X-rays can’t pierce.
Staring from my window I observe
Monadnock surfing toward me
while folding over itself like
a school of porpoise. I sketch
in my notebook a design
for a brain truss supportive
as those Roosevelt devised
to prop economic policies
the Republicans despised. “Brain trust,”
Carole whispers, but I sketch
and sketch, including the folds
in the landscape, big creases
that crush major cities like Nanking,
Madras, Belgrade, and Dijon.
Not that I have the influence
to manufacture and peddle
so abstract a medical breakthrough,
but looking over my shoulder
someone of abstruse reasoning
could read history on my side,
those jagged mountains cringing
as they tumble into each other
in slews of landslide, the crust
folding and refolding like road maps
crumpled in the hands of the lost.
The way landscapes are folding
into each other requires
the kinetic mental support
of a brain truss to comprehend.
China and India, mountains
of sawtoothed, feverish rock,
fold into wads of money thick
as tectonic plates. Europe
with gothic and Romanesque
churches converted to villas
for the stuporous rich folds
its national boundaries and forms
a density X-rays can’t pierce.
Staring from my window I observe
Monadnock surfing toward me
while folding over itself like
a school of porpoise. I sketch
in my notebook a design
for a brain truss supportive
as those Roosevelt devised
to prop economic policies
the Republicans despised. “Brain trust,”
Carole whispers, but I sketch
and sketch, including the folds
in the landscape, big creases
that crush major cities like Nanking,
Madras, Belgrade, and Dijon.
Not that I have the influence
to manufacture and peddle
so abstract a medical breakthrough,
but looking over my shoulder
someone of abstruse reasoning
could read history on my side,
those jagged mountains cringing
as they tumble into each other
in slews of landslide, the crust
folding and refolding like road maps
crumpled in the hands of the lost.
