to learn to steadily unpack
the navel oranges exactly as they sit
on the table, to draw the precise distance
between the two pieces of citrus,
how light catches the pebbled flesh,
the flecks of shadow that fall
into miniscule valleys, the lamplight
that dazzles one pole of fruit bursting
with miniature oranges tucked into the globe
of larger fruit, the midnight that darkens the other.
Bridge
In her dream her son is dead.
Candy cannot call his name
as she once did when,
four, he opened the iron gate
at the park in Paris, careened down the hill
past the waffle seller and the black swan
toward the boulevard, cafes, gleaming cars.
That was before she learned the names
of machines she can now forget: Renault,
Audi, Toyota Chevrolet, GM, Volvo.
She can forget the spelling rules,
the multiplication tables, the names
and dates of all the presidents of the USA,
the names of girls.
None of them will do any good.
And then it is morning.
He is twenty-one. Candy doesn’t know
where he is, not exactly
though certainly he is in America,
probably in a car, and she—
surrounded by fog rising from the pines trees,
from the hemlock, from the James river,
from the Shenandoah mountains—
taking her coffee down to the water
hears a single engine in the distance.
One rusty pick-up truck approaches
with farm tags on the gravel road.
A hand flies up and waves to her
and moves past her where she stands on the bridge
in the only location she knows for sure.
Expedition
Audrey shuts the book on Shackleton,
the photos of his men: playing soccer in snow,
the Endurance foundered in blocks of ice
beyond them; gathered around the fire
on Elephant Island, their weathered faces
lit with wonder as they listen to stories
waiting for the rescue team;
petting the stripped tabby cat
that Shackleton finally shot
after calling it a weakling.
She would have been the cat
Audrey thinks worrying about the daughter
she raised alone, who careens
on the slick back roads of America
in her Japanese car. She rises from the couch
throws aside the weight of quilts
to choose the spices from the carousel
on the dining room table, soothed by
the tiny achievement of the small
wooden spoon in its bowl of salt,
the four ounce canister of tandoori spice,
glass bottles of whole black peppercorns,
cinnamon, nutmeg. She stands at the center
of a rag rug woven into a labyrinth of sienna,
green and blue, boiling the collard greens,
soy paste and tofu. Her daughter sings hello
as she arrives, elegant and oblivious,
from the storm, pets the purring tabby
that sleeps at the head of the table.
Satisfaction
Not forgetting of course rising from the body that once thrilled you
with the same delight you now recognize in golden retrievers
chasing Frisbees
or calves born at the penultimate day of spring frisking in pastures
carpeted with blue violets, lime colored grasses, dandelions like helium balloons.
Glittering space shuttles land safely in limpid blue oceans like transparent silks.
The heroic astronauts resume the paperwork of their everyday lives
to a tedious fanfare. The golden puppy now sleeps half the day.
The toddler bites into the velvety pink Easter egg to discover salt.
Friendships once fields of sweet clover, gone stale,
weigh down your body like moldy hay bales left in the rain.
What do you do with entire continents of disappointment
once exhausted by the early rages?
John Cage said if something is boring for five minutes
do it for ten, if boring for ten do it for twenty, if it is boring
for twenty,
do it an hour, and so on for eternity. I think he had an answer
to cherry blossoms after the spectacular show and the
heartrending petal fall.
Peter Kent
Surliness in the Green Mountains
I like to complain
about too little steamed milk
in coffee. And ill-timed
cloud cover stripping the blue face
off the ocean. I know
I’m fortunate. No cancerous calamity
has found me. No car crash
has maimed me. Pulling away
from the drive-through, my drink’s too hot
to taste, to judge. I turn
the wheel toward the hem
of mountains, where clouds press
like sour insistence: I have a duty
to attend, a funeral for a colleague’s father.
It will cost me
two of the days I’ve rented the house
on the cove for a holiday—a holiday
to still the flurry of a life that feels
like coins spilling to the pavement
through a hole in my pant’s pocket.
I should have gone to Jamaica.
Someplace beyond obligation’s
reach. A foreign paradise,
blinged by palms and voices
redolent, familiar, but off kilter.
It helps to get places
where traffic lights seem superfluous
as they do in Montpelier. Though,
I often stand before travel books
on Budapest—petulant and wishing
to be swallowed by its pandemonium.
Cities are survival’s hallmarks.
Slaughter and roast everyone
rooted in them, and they rebound,
resilient as Vermont maples after winter.
This beleaguered Toyota
doesn’t like the climb—its four cylinders
wheezing, coaxing combustion
to reach another summit.
The service will be in the same chapel
where my colleague was married, back
when she was a friend. I never knew
her father. So why the struggle
to attend? To be politic, to feel less
awkward when we run into each other
at a meeting back in Boston? I suppose
that’s enough motivation. Or,
maybe I simply relish
something new
for my repertoire of complaints.
A flat tire, broken axle—
a chance to show
how far I’ll go to suffer.
Meditation Waiting for the Orange Line
If I were a savant,
I could calculate the number
of lavender tiles that cover
the walls in this station.
I could detect the aria
in the brake squall
arriving from Forest Hills.
I would grasp the quantum dimensions
that transcend the urge to copulate,
and that lush-lipped girl’s photograph
in the frame beyond the tracks
could never entice me
to purchase toothpaste
that can’t possibly whiten
enamel this stained by coffee
and neglect. If I were a savant,
I could remain mute,
without consequence
or criticism: He hardly ever
talks to anyone. I might know
the mollusk phylum’s almost infinite
array, from pre-history to present.
No one would know.
Gifted as a sideshow act
in an intellectual circus,
I could recite Sumerian limericks
and every move from the past
twenty years’ chess championships.
If I were a savant, I’d tattoo syllables
down the backs of waterfalls
and watch them coalesce to sonnets,
in the mist and foam of pools
at the base of the cliffs
we’re all tottering toward.
But I’m not a savant.
I’m an overwrought grunger
passing through mid-life
with a messenger’s bag of images
muddled as crayon drawings.
I am St. Francis to mosquitos.
I guard a small vault
dubiously filled with trivia:
the two dozen counties in the states
of Vermont and New Hampshire,
the lyrics of most songs
Pearl Jam’s recorded.
To be a savant might be
wondrous. To scan and recall
every word in the dictionary—
vocabulary unfettered by the urge
to reorder and coax meaning
to the surface. To the savant,
meaning kicks off its shoes
and finds a careworn bed in a room suffused
with incomprehensibility’s pleasures . . .
the city’s walls resting in the distance,
untroubled by a single ambition. If
I could join the savants’ tribe,
would I? It’s easy to proclaim one might
choose to undiscover the practical,
to let incandescence dissolve into dark’s mystery.
Perhaps what’s wanted is a variation
on Kurzweil’s singularity: To integrate
intellect and insight with savant capacity
could be the next stop on evolution’s tour.
Here’s the Orange Line, at last . . .
screeching, rolling, rectangular
pumpkin, ready to ferry us
to Downtown Crossing.
If I were a savant, I might
not know to get on. I might stand
here all afternoon, like an arrow
without a bow. Harmless
potential. Traveler on an island
of flesh, unsure how to reach
any destination beyond
this maze of interior revelations.
If I were a savant, wouldn’t I
be happy
just to be here?
Blowing the Third Eye
A friend would never threaten to paddle
up the Amazon in a canoe commanded
by an American-turned-shaman. What
could be less American? Wait, did you say
hallucinogens are involved? And,
a vomit bucket? It sounds suspiciously like
the Age of Aquarius as reimagined by Dick Cheney.
Or, a variation on the sublimely surreal—like the time
Allen Ginsberg cleared an audience at an all-girl’s school
in Kansas with a soliloquy on ass-fucking.
Language can only transcend so far. It takes
a good hit of ayahuasca to blow the lid
from the third eye, to melt the wall where
the snakes gyrate like electrified ribbons
through undetected dimensions. Split and
spill the terrors that hunger for one’s life . . .
those vibratory hells that demand homage,
that refuse to cauterize lonely nights with vodka
bottles. When television nurses hunger
for amenable society, who could argue
that the ship has foundered on a shoal
of snapping serpents? In the jungle’s night,
any shaman’s a beacon. Even the Pentecostal pastor,
with all his uncaged tigers of damnation, might seem
a friend. Physical ruin feels right (or at least familiar).
Whatever potion one can find to swallow, to salvage
the pretension of a soul . . . that’s medicine worth
a paddle up the Amazon, worth a wade in magical
self-delusion’s improbable realms. Say hello
to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson . . .
they’re the only angels
who might prove all that’s unseen
transcends the drying skin
on this latticework that carries us
through these days.
Under the Influence
The best days often include
a browse through a bookstore.
When my libido was more
vigorous, I liked to sneak a paperback
kama sutra to the automotive section.
I appreciate the symmetry now—
the proper calibration of carburetor
and clitoris both essential
to effective performance and power.
Though at the time, I imagined,
if caught, I could claim to have found
(quite unexpectedly) this sexual concordance
tucked between Edmunds Used Car Guide and
the Encyclopedia of Corvettes. These days,
I gravitate to the literary review section.
It’s interesting to see poems written by people
I know—and there’s always the potential to find
that gloriously intact shell, tumbling in the surf,
inhabited by some living thing wanting someone
to appreciate its nearly unrecognizable luster.
Tonight I sit beside a poster—On Becoming
an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician.
So much wisdom undiscovered, crusted and nestled
like jewels in the strata of bound pages. Though
we’re such lazy miners, requiring Provigil’s
stimulation and the simulated realities of television
to provoke the intellect. I might hurry back down
Newbury Street to catch Saturday Night Live.
What a metaphoric mash. This week’s show’s a repeat—
leftover, half-clever satire in three minute skits, wedged
between commercials. I’ve got a bed half-buried
in books and unread New Yorkers. It makes
me apprehensive to sleep with so much knowledge
wanting to snuggle with my witless, empty notebook
of a mind. So, I’ll probably doze on the couch
and wake to infomercials in the netherworld
that insomniacs are cursed to wander—
having dreamt a shaman with a blouse half-
unbuttoned, finding the windows
to my consciousness open—believing
it’s Whitman’s fingers brushing my hair,
trusting I’ve written this indisputably compelling
paean for an original century.
William Doreski
Gathering Sea Lavender
Gathering sea lavender
in salt marshes south of Brunswick
we ease ourselves into contours
so gentle they don’t show on maps.
Only the washboard effect
of successive waves of lavender
reveals a dainty presence.
Sea lavender sells for five
dollars a spray in Boston,
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but we’re harvesting just enough
to warm us one dreary winter,
a candelabra as nostalgic
as my mother’s genealogy.
Last night when the wind banged the doors
in our rented cottage and the tide
swept our neighbor’s dory from the beach,
we felt each other quicken in sleep
as we both dreamt of gathering
sea lavender in brilliant light.
I also dreamt, quite separately,
that a former lover came home
to sort through my possessions
and take away what pleased her,
especially sentimental
items like the shard of slate
from the Deerfield Massacre stone,
the purple ribbon from Robert
Lowell’s grave, the small glass cat
that was my first gift from my wife.
No wonder when morning came
I proposed we scout the marshes
for sea lavender, despite the rain,
our bodies still uneasy
upon us, the briny damp
revealing as X-rays or radar,
the losses of our previous lives
reflected by the stony fog
and empowered by the radiance
ignited by our love of the sea.
Hurricanes Named After Us
The season’s first two hurricanes
have named themselves after us.
As they plow across the Atlantic
toward Florida, we drift over
books we’ve admired all our lives.
You’re still retreating from Moscow
in the bosom of War and Peace
while I drift along the equator
in the doldrums of Moby-Dick.
Your storm will cross to the Gulf
before mine. Your violence spent
on the cringing Everglades, you’ll ease
long before reaching Galveston,
while passing south of the Keys I’ll trip
unimpeded down to Veracruz
and shatter on Mexico’s highlands.
The summer heat drips from the trees
in long greasy strings of drool.
Your air-conditioned townhouse
insulates you from the silence
that centers in my tiny house
as though a giant foot has crushed
the finest of my earthly functions.
Soon the fall semester will fill
our datebooks. Scholarly poise
will sculpt you upright and prim,
but I’ll slump like Igor to class
and growl and frighten young women
and make the stoned young fellows laugh.
Neither of us look like hurricanes,
but the government knows better,
and named its storms as precisely
as decorum allows. Enjoy
your book. Palm Beach and Miami
curse you, but don’t worry. Soon enough