Poetry Issue 1
William Doreski
Milkweed Days
Across the Fremont land the wisps
of milkweed flutter like strands
of exploded cobweb. I palm
a half-pod and crumple it
to feel the papery compression,
then feed the fragments to the breeze.
When I was six I pestered
Joanne Szluc with sticky tangles
of milkweed filaments. Armed
with the milk squeezed from the leaves,
I pawed the mess into her hair.
The cottony fibers were white
as Grandma’s earnest and faintly
senile gazed, so Joanne cried
that I’d made a hag of her.
We stared at each other a moment,
thrilled that she’d used the word “hag.”
The tattered milkweed stalks relaxed
as we ran off laughing; then later,
to punish, she pushed me face-down
into garden mulch, and I let her.
A New Range
Raking leaves in the ruined light
of November, I feel too small
to account for myself. Blake
at my age had littered the world
with cloudy, muscular figures
braced against eons of myth.
Milton had rendered Paradise Lost
out of scraps of bible no one
had read carefully enough to catch
the epic winking in the background.
I rake the leaves into brittle piles
like papyrus that famously burned
at Alexandria. Greek texts
remain Greek to me, a lifelong
lack of discipline denying me
Homer’s naked voice. And now
a delivery truck rumbles up
my driveway, and two bulky men
wrestle a new range to install
in my kitchen. More debt to claim
a place in my life. The leaves drift
like dunes. I lean on my rake
and watch the delivery men slide
the old range onto their truck to dump
in a salvage yard in Nashua.
This world is too matter-of-fact
to comprehend Blake or Milton,
the creaking of the big white truck
as it rumbles down the driveway
more rhythmic than Jerusalem
or Samson Agonistes. I rake
the oak leaves from the driveway
with a regular sweeping motion
that represents the epic I no
longer want to write, the silence
too gray and simple to break.
William Doreski’s work has appeared in many print and electronic journals, including Another Ice Age (AA Press, 2007) and his most recent collection, Waiting for the Angel (Pygmy Forest Press, 2009). He teaches writing and literature at Keene (NH) State College.
