Two by William Doreski

Uncle Chet's Boiled Coffee

My Uncle Chet boiled coffee
for a week. The tar in the pot
tasted like a miracle--

not the one of loaves and fishes
but the one no gospel recounts
for fear of a libel suit.

The woolen but rainless sky
disappoints. The garden soil
cracks like Egyptian pottery.

Red squirrels squeak in the hemlocks,
taunting each other in language
ornate as the plaster ceilings

of mansions. I can't contain
this runaway afternoon--
visions of children on bicycles

run down by reckless drivers
scar the soft parts of my brain.
This hurts like an old-fashioned band

concert, the kind I once suffered
at Weirs Beach, where my parents
had dragged me in the full blush

of adolescence. The year before,
Count Basie's orchestra had won
my attention and respect,

and two years before, Duke Ellington
had battered his piano silly
right under my bluff little nose.

The lack of rain has saddened me
in shades of tepid gray and taupe,
but there's still a month of summer,

in theory, and the nights still ring
with coyote howls and barks.
Uncle Chet's been dead for many years,

but I can still taste his coffee—
which he learned to make on beachheads
in the Solomon islands, the guns

coughing and banging everywhere
and the tropical rain so sticky
he sometimes mistook it for blood.

#

Redwoods

Thirteen years since the murders.
The house slouches in the brush,
the windows punctured by rocks.
No one’s gone in, though. Thick dust

carpets the pine board floors.
Faint chalk outlines remember
the slump of bodies. Furniture
lies askew, just as struggle left it.

Spiders, black and pink bulges,
have webbed the corners of the rooms
and booby-trapped the doorways.
I enter swinging a stick

to dissipate both spiders and gloom.
The three people who died here
meant nothing to me alive,
but have troubled my dreams since death.

So I’ve flown to San Francisco,
rented a sporty white Saab,
and cruised up Highway One north
to discover how remote from me

and the world this fatal canyon is.
Redwoods loom over the crime scene
and filter the sunlight, allowing
only the bleak of the spectrum

to shine on this fragile house.
No one has looted, no one
has even browsed the spilled books—
beat classics, mostly, Burroughs

and Genet. Blood spatter has sunk
so deeply into the wallboard
not even fire can erase it.
But willing to try, I pour

the five gallons of gasoline
I think sufficient for the job,
step outside, ignite a newspaper
and toss it in. The eruption

howls more loudly in the mind
than in the world. A fine gray ash
fills me. Rain blows off the sea
to keep the fire from spreading.

I walk a mile back to my car,
confident that that any ghosts
that survive are only ghosts of me,
bored silly by staying alive.

Prose Poem: William Doreski

My Former Muse

Last night the weedy red hair of my former muse descended to veil from me the decent rooms, the decent wife, the decent town, and numb me into visions or versions of what might have been. Lying in a pasture in Vermont while the October wind opened our pores and looked in, we stroked each other raw. Perfect weather for the disaffected, the Taconics on their toes, every wrinkle brazen, every tree brisk and complex. She asked me to stay and find some menial job as bartender, perhaps, or bus boy in the restaurant where she waitressed, her hair knotted, her uniform too short to cover her sunburned thighs. I couldn't solve our lives so quickly. The soughing of the Battenkill below us sparked a language more inspired than mine. Trout leapt freely at the close of their long heartless season. Last night she returned to make up, but the silence has deepened and her red hair's going gray. Her children must be grown. Perhaps she married someone braver than me, perhaps she lives alone in that serene lack of motion that reminded me of sunning reptiles, her awkward features relaxed, her meatless scarred legs folded under her, every detail fixed in repose as she waits for me to abandon my worn old ego and with free will enter her own.

Time-Lapse Conversation by William Doreski

So I heard on the news your son
climbed a tree to save a kitten.
No, I heard on the news a kitten

climbed a tree to save your son.
Wind from the north. Rain as drab
as oatmeal. Firefighters swore

they’d never seen so heroic
a scene. No, it wasn’t a tree
but a skyscraper. Not a kitten

but a candidate for President.
Not your son but a famous,
famously bearded anarchist.

Not a rescue but a botched
assassination. We agree
that all’s well that ends. Crouched

in your office drinking coffee
we agree that your son would save
a kitten if the situation

warranted grave intervention.
We agree that the anarchist
acts according to his nature.

We agree that cold rain has changed
to snow, to buttery flakes smooth
against the dirty windowpane.

The coffee goes down as cleanly
as history goes down in books.
The four o’clock news reports

that rumors of an attempted
assassination are false. Your son
appears in the doorway cuddling

an orange tabby kitten. We rise
and thank him for interrupting
this time-lapse conversation,

the snowfall brisk as a landslide
and your son’s beard thick enough
to shelter a thousand motives.