William Doreski- Three Poems

The Difference that Clouds Make

I haven’t showered for a week,

so in paper slippers I trek

half a mile to the bathhouse

and find an armless, legless man

shelved on a slippery tile ledge.

He appears asleep or dead,

so I step into the steamy rush

and scour myself silly and pink.

When I step out, the man’s gray lips

wrestle as he tries to explain.

Combing my hair produces

bursts of electrostatic sparks.

Toweling my awkward torso

requires so much effort I fail

to focus on the man’s whispers,

although I catch some phrases

like green is the night and men

in helmets borne on steel. Maybe

I should recognize the source

of these random quotations;

but although limbless the man

now waves ghostly arms and stands

on smoky full-length trousers.

Maybe he had simply folded

himself unnaturally compact.

Maybe he has regenerated

his limbs in the moist fungal air.

Maybe his spirit has assumed

the role his body used to play.

He mutters, the difference that clouds

make over a town. I shake

his misty ghost-hand to encourage

his attempt to materialize.

He almost musters a smile.

Then bulked in my terry bathrobe

I withdraw, scraping my slippers

along the gravel path outside,

back to my cabin where I pose

legless and armless in a mirror

that has never flattered me

and doesn’t recall my name.

In Your Secular Majesty

A burnt-out apartment block

overlooks the bicyclist crushed

by a big truck at the corner

of Beacon. A crowd gathers,

but I dodge down the alley,

admiring the antique brickwork,

and emerge into dappled gray

with a view of glass skyscrapers

grinning with brutalist power.

I want to be urban enough

to accept the grid-plan of streets

as a natural excrescence.

I want the fatal traffic to stall

long enough for me to escape

into the lobby of the building

where your acolytes worship

with legally approved gestures

and conscience clear as isinglass.

You won’t receive me in person,

but inflamed by that accident,

which I witnessed in full color,

I’m ripe enough to render blue

and black and red and all shades

between, like a painter obsessed

with a bowl of rotting fruit.

You’ll read about the bicyclist

and respond in the cacophony

of tones I’ve willed you. But

that muck of prismatic angst

obscures the ignorance of machines,

the blunt force of skyscrapers,

the cringing of alleys hidden

behind nineteenth-century houses.

You in your secular majesty

perched in an upper-floor office

overlook nothing but a fog

of pearly yellow vapors

most people mistake for residue

of things we’re afraid to say.

Your Libido

You worry that your libido

will detach on hot nights and prowl

half-abandoned neighborhoods

for men so addled by crack or speed

they’ll mistake your ghostly excrescence

for the muse of their drug of choice.

You fear that in their attempts

to sexually master vacancies

between themselves and the rainbow

of your presence they’ll employ

organs designed for other use

and destroy themselves in bloodbaths

the police won’t try to explain.

Lightning sizzles in the north.

The river, dammed at its mouth,

reflects skyscrapers lit until dawn.

You lie awake with a volume

of Tolstoy, hoping your libido

will return without that vicious smile

that means it has killed again

without your permission. Later

over breakfast you’ll confer

with a couple of yawning lawyers

who will deny your liability

by claiming that some insanities

shine like pyrites and confuse

even the wariest with fevers

not even Freud himself could tame.

The streets, glossy with last night’s rain,

will greet you with the routine

of traffic, snarl of diesel buses,

and taxis gleaming like lilies.                                            

You’ll hulk in your office and deploy

functionaries to the world’s end,

snuffling through useless memos

like a hound after truffles;

and when gasping and drooling

your libido returns you’ll greet it

with a perfunctory handshake

and no invitation to sit.