William Doreski


The Fall of America

At the swimming hole, the children
break through ice, laughing, and splash
naked until they grow scales
and give up on being human.
We watch from a safe distance.
We’re aware that behind the drugstore

complications develop as men
gulp handfuls of outdated pills
and women shaped like turbines
snort lifetimes of nasal spray.
No wonder reproduction seems
unlikely and unwise. New snow

whispers in the burnt-out houses
whose inhabitants misunderstood
the anger we’ve misnamed “religion.”
The local morgue has annexed
a former fast-food warehouse
where giant walk-in freezers purr

and the dead look so indifferent
their relatives sigh with relief.
Yesterday the radio warned
thaw would bring yellow fever
and the stench could overwhelm
the most dedicated volunteers.

We should do as the children
have done, become amphibious,
or join the drug culture groaning
in the alley. More likely
we’ll go home and write a book
about the Fall of America,

as though Ginsberg hadn’t already
claimed that title, brew cocoa
and listen to the snowfall hiss
across the windy landscape
like a million tongues of gossip
tripping on our mutual name.


The Woman in the Flammable Skirt

The woman in the flammable skirt mistakes every gray for ash. Her personal rummage sale precedes her, hundreds of items tagged for instant turnover. Some are organs she coughed up a long time ago, when nuns ruled the earth and converted the Jews to salt and pepper shakers. Others are fingernail parings on which famous French poets inscribed the names of the mothers they most hated. Still others are textbooks printed in surf from Cape Hatteras, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Horn, and Cape Cod. This rummage sale catches fire so often she realizes she has mistaken flammable for inflammable. So the grays crawl in the roadside ditch and spring into her personal space at predictable but unthinkable intervals. The woman sees herself as a refugee from Noir. Or maybe Oz, Atlantis, or the famous Cream City ghetto. Her body fits so loosely she’s afraid it will fall off just to embarrass her before the friction takes hold and her grasp of the earth reifies the husbands she sold to famous universities. Snow drips from a plastic drain pipe. She kneels and drinks and extinguishes her fires from the inside out, and the grays whimper in the ditch, and the flammable snuffs the inflammable in a shower of lit syllables, as if the Times Book Review had exploded, leaving no heirs.


What Sort of Fool Metaphor

You’ve joined the post-Christian mob
so I’m going through your papers,
reading the letters you wrote but
never sent. The paper nicks
tiny bits of flesh from my hands
in memory of the primal rage

embodied in your holograph—
the loops and swirls still prissy
as a child’s. You wrote, “I never
loved nor despised but laughed you
into the shape of a demon
I then pretended to possess.”

Your one-room condo sighs as heat
hustles through the copper pipes.
The avenue stalls in a tremor
of honking horns. You lived here
too long, your pores too receptive
to the snoring of the city.

No wonder you wrote these letters
and refused to pay the postage
or the steep emotional tariff
the recipients might impose.
“Last night I lay in the lap
of god and quacked like a mallard

with joy!” What sort of fool metaphor
did you think you were imposing?
Too bad you addressed these letters
to me. Your more serious lovers
would have fossilized all over
if you’d actually mailed such trash.

Wherever your apocalypse
has taken you, I hope you’re glad,
the traffic on the avenue
coughing fumes into your room
to wilt the letters I’m reading
with a mind as open as a sump.



William Doreski's most recent collection of poetry is Another Ice Age. 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, Natural Bridge.

 
 
 
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