2 minute read
William Doreski
Toxic Metal
Why did I dream of massive steel I-beams dumped in my driveway and arranged into runes legible only from an airplane? Also piles of lumber and a grumbling truckload of concrete ready to spill its guts. What manner of construction does this imply?
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Daylight catches me unawares. My arm doesn’t ache from yesterday’s tetanus shot. Does this mean that it didn’t take and I’m doomed to die miserably of lockjaw, my torso arcing with agony, my teeth crushed in my grimace, unable to beg for mercy?
Do those steel girders imply that toxic metal lurks somewhere south of immediate attention? If I could read the runes scrawled by those I-beams maybe I’d learn the name and telephone number of my fate. And what of those piles of creosote-drenched lumber?
The dream dissipates. Too late to solve the runic message I wrote myself, too late to pour that concrete over all the flaws in my thinking. I don’t really expect tetanus to dramatize my narrative but I shouldn’t rely on my dream life to tell me how and when to die.
William Doreski
This Day of Conscious Effect
The manly stride of the mountains lengthens in yellow mist. Despite a night of excess, tree toads continue their riot. You lean against the sunrise and debate me on the finer points of landscape, which politicians claim for themselves.
Today we need haircuts and wine, so driving downtown with purpose we’ll look like useful citizens, despite our cramped expressions and the fog of our exhaust. The salon re-opened after months of pandemic, scissors idle as so many X-marks the spots.
The proprietor will greet us with affect as flat as Kansas. Our trimmed hair strewn on the floor will suggest an act of flora. We must assemble ourselves for this day of conscious effect. We must dress so the clippings won’t show when we shop for wine among other serious drinkers.
But the landscape places a lien on us, taking advantage of our aesthetic indebtedness. If the scenery plans to foreclose we’d better curb our spending— threats of fatal weather lurking even with the sky in repose.
William Doreski
You Consider the Apples
Your apples never ripen but drop green and hard from the tree. A lack of confidence? Spraying the flowers to fend off the deer may discourage the fruit that later dangles like Christmas ornaments. Too much thinking. Like you pondering childhood in Poland, your father repairing scruffy autos from the Soviet Union and your mother nursing children abandoned by unwilling parents. You breached the university in a thunder of competing tongues. You graduated with such triumph it deflated the stark old regime, leaving a wreckage of heroes in foolish historical poses. Now you consider the apples, their small tough size, their weak hold on the tree. You suspect that capitalist norms disfavor the old varieties of apple, modest but firm, subject to worms. Under the full moon of summer, you swear a vegan allegiance that should move any flora to tears. Meanwhile deep in the wormwood the eggs of subversive insects hatch with a tiny private sound. You return to the house with a sigh the color of rotting newsprint. Those freshly hatched subversives are plotting mindless tactics, their instincts thicker than night, advantaged by lack of language.
