Promise of Light's Featured Poet:William Doreski
William is an English professor at Keene State College in New Hampshire
and is the author of several books. After reading his poems here,
it will become clear why he is our featured poet.
Forests Overlap Us
Forests overlap us. Our tracks
in snow draw blood. The rigid
parallels muffle our speech.
You’re struggling with distance
only a child could render
in sufficiently primal colors
while I close my book and focus
on the grainy backs of my hands.
Today in Walpole I’ll discuss
the future of the arts while you
fly first-class to a tropical spa,
leaving your snow-prints to fill
with more snow, leaving a silence
shaped like a cantaloupe. Tomorrow
in your absence the trees will bend
in a north wind and raccoons
will emerge with their critical gaze.
You’ll flourish in a stucco hotel
where men who stoop with the burden
of money will stalk young women,
ignoring but amusing you.
The days will conspire but fail
to overturn familiar motifs:
crows racketing in snowy pines,
bikinis unfolding in the sand,
coffee gasping in porcelain mugs,
fruit drinks glistening in hairy fists.
We’ll always have the forests
overlapping us, but while I
lose myself among leafless trees
you escape so adroitly I can’t
be sure you’ve ever been present.
Even if the distance someday
crushes you, even if the crows
learn human speech, even if rich
hairy men beg our forgiveness,
the arts in America have staked
their future on the differences
between people like us rather
than the parallels, the forests
overlapping us as loosely
as armies of unbuttoned coats.
in snow draw blood. The rigid
parallels muffle our speech.
You’re struggling with distance
only a child could render
in sufficiently primal colors
while I close my book and focus
on the grainy backs of my hands.
Today in Walpole I’ll discuss
the future of the arts while you
fly first-class to a tropical spa,
leaving your snow-prints to fill
with more snow, leaving a silence
shaped like a cantaloupe. Tomorrow
in your absence the trees will bend
in a north wind and raccoons
will emerge with their critical gaze.
You’ll flourish in a stucco hotel
where men who stoop with the burden
of money will stalk young women,
ignoring but amusing you.
The days will conspire but fail
to overturn familiar motifs:
crows racketing in snowy pines,
bikinis unfolding in the sand,
coffee gasping in porcelain mugs,
fruit drinks glistening in hairy fists.
We’ll always have the forests
overlapping us, but while I
lose myself among leafless trees
you escape so adroitly I can’t
be sure you’ve ever been present.
Even if the distance someday
crushes you, even if the crows
learn human speech, even if rich
hairy men beg our forgiveness,
the arts in America have staked
their future on the differences
between people like us rather
than the parallels, the forests
overlapping us as loosely
as armies of unbuttoned coats.
Expensive Vodka for Dinner
Expensive vodka for dinner,
the early spring dusk muddled
as a bad translation of Plato.
We lie as flat as we dare
on a mattress that hurts our backs
and rehash the crimes of our lives.
We should have gone to law school
and sued the school for accepting us
and sued ourselves for abuse.
We should have become great surgeons
and excised the organs we’ve failed
to understand. Instead we’ve moped
at the doors of Gothic cathedrals,
slouched through the Louvre and nearly
suffocated in the Uffizi
and Hermitage, and stood outside
Andy Warhol’s former Factory
and wept because the smell of river
revoked so much of the pleasure
we though we’d taken along the way.
We lie so flat the picture
projected by our large TV
pours over us without a loss
of photons, and the sound digresses
without characters taking offense.
If only we could so dramatize
the nether parts of our stories,
scripting tragedies Racine
would admire for their allegiance
to unities of time, place, and guile.
Who would produce such challenges
to the laws of physics? We nod
as the vodka tightens its grip.
Such indulgence doesn’t become us,
but what does? We slur like children
and laugh ourselves through a movie
about gangsters and brutal sex,
and as dark becomes definitive
the bedroom becomes too small
to escape, and the cruel mattress
absorbs us like a path of mud
impressed in an arid landscape.
the early spring dusk muddled
as a bad translation of Plato.
We lie as flat as we dare
on a mattress that hurts our backs
and rehash the crimes of our lives.
We should have gone to law school
and sued the school for accepting us
and sued ourselves for abuse.
We should have become great surgeons
and excised the organs we’ve failed
to understand. Instead we’ve moped
at the doors of Gothic cathedrals,
slouched through the Louvre and nearly
suffocated in the Uffizi
and Hermitage, and stood outside
Andy Warhol’s former Factory
and wept because the smell of river
revoked so much of the pleasure
we though we’d taken along the way.
We lie so flat the picture
projected by our large TV
pours over us without a loss
of photons, and the sound digresses
without characters taking offense.
If only we could so dramatize
the nether parts of our stories,
scripting tragedies Racine
would admire for their allegiance
to unities of time, place, and guile.
Who would produce such challenges
to the laws of physics? We nod
as the vodka tightens its grip.
Such indulgence doesn’t become us,
but what does? We slur like children
and laugh ourselves through a movie
about gangsters and brutal sex,
and as dark becomes definitive
the bedroom becomes too small
to escape, and the cruel mattress
absorbs us like a path of mud
impressed in an arid landscape.
Stoker's Boundary
The river path ends in a gnarl
of barbed wire. Stoker’s boundary.
Beyond, fields comb down the slope,
almost to the river-bottom.
When I was twelve I trespassed
on Stoker’s farm and discovered
steer carcasses left to decay
in a pasture near a pigsty.
The extinguished creatures collapsed
like badly upholstered furniture.
Excited by the mess, I explored
the length and width of the pasture,
counting a hundred slouching dead.
Now I wonder if those bodies
meant anything in profit or loss,
meat and hide abandoned to roast
in the August sun. Disease, maybe,
rendered the cattle useless. I cross
the barbed wire onto Stoker’s land
and examine the muddy ground
but find no footprints, not even
Satan’s. Yet Stoker still raises beef,
since in fields above the river
I spot at least a dozen head
browsing the early spring grass.
If I scoured the farthest field
would I find a bone or two left
bleaching for half a century?
The cattle slumped like pup tents.
The organs spilled like vegetables.
I felt no disgust, only
a scientist’s detachment.
But I’m not as objective now
and even a single dry bone
could wring me until I sighed.
Back across the barbed-wire boundary
I retrace the river path
and distance myself from the old
disaster, the smell of the water
so neutral it convinces me
even sloppy death scenes suppose
a whimsical purpose in matter.
of barbed wire. Stoker’s boundary.
Beyond, fields comb down the slope,
almost to the river-bottom.
When I was twelve I trespassed
on Stoker’s farm and discovered
steer carcasses left to decay
in a pasture near a pigsty.
The extinguished creatures collapsed
like badly upholstered furniture.
Excited by the mess, I explored
the length and width of the pasture,
counting a hundred slouching dead.
Now I wonder if those bodies
meant anything in profit or loss,
meat and hide abandoned to roast
in the August sun. Disease, maybe,
rendered the cattle useless. I cross
the barbed wire onto Stoker’s land
and examine the muddy ground
but find no footprints, not even
Satan’s. Yet Stoker still raises beef,
since in fields above the river
I spot at least a dozen head
browsing the early spring grass.
If I scoured the farthest field
would I find a bone or two left
bleaching for half a century?
The cattle slumped like pup tents.
The organs spilled like vegetables.
I felt no disgust, only
a scientist’s detachment.
But I’m not as objective now
and even a single dry bone
could wring me until I sighed.
Back across the barbed-wire boundary
I retrace the river path
and distance myself from the old
disaster, the smell of the water
so neutral it convinces me
even sloppy death scenes suppose
a whimsical purpose in matter.
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