Our June featured poet touches on bad art and sinister religion, removing the distance between Europe and a gloomy New England.
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~~~
Let’s Take a Taxi, Why Not?
We four crowd into a cab.
I’m in the front seat. From Copley
to the museum: one mile.
The cab rockets south, veering
into the urban wilderness.
A short cut, the driver claims.
Snarling, I bare my gray old teeth.
Neighborhoods of sallow brick
shudder past, encrusted with age.
Streets tangle and knot. Night falls
with a thud that shakes the cab.
Warehouses rear up like Viking
burial mounds. The meter
reads thirty-one dollars. I rip
the key from the ignition
and toss it out the window.
The engine roars with outrage.
I tear off the driver’s glasses
and crush them in my fist.
The cab speeds over a bridge
spanning an oily black river.
Faceless and unlit buildings
threaten with lack of expression.
In the back seat you three agree
we’re being kidnapped to Iran
or Somalia. I punch the driver
until blood veils his entire face.
The cab rushes on. He whimpers
sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.
I try to phone for help but
reach only a garble of voices.
The cab crashes into a storefront.
Police arrive. They speak French.
We climb from the cab, astonished
that this cringing driver drove us
three thousand miles to Paris
for only thirty-one Euros.
Non, monsieur, a gendarme says.
Francs, not Euros. Plane trees
whisper in vowels more textured
than Boston’s. After tipping
the tired and weepy driver
we stroll down boulevard Saint-Germain
as dawn cranks up its curtain
and the day’s fresh croissants smile.
~~~
Like an Old Dutch Landscape Painting
The flaw in the corner of my eye
lurches across my vision
like blood-prints in snow. The path
behind the machine shop hisses
with sleet-fall peppering asphalt.
A compressor groans and hammers
and two men curse each other
trying to unload a big pine crate
from a stake truck. Three kids on bikes
skid along screaming. At the brook,
still unfrozen and flowing like gray
overlapping sheets of metal,
tracks of some hungry creature,
a possum, I think, march across
the pathway and down the bank.
Easy to read the purpose
in that four-footed stride, the trough
where the belly dragged in the grass,
a deeper rut plowed by its nose.
Beyond the bridge a vapor streak
ripply as cellophane tape rises
from a machine shop vent and curls
into the mist above. I’m shrinking
as I walk, the view expanding
as half the continent unloads
its gloom on New England, expanding
like an old Dutch landscape painting,
its human figures perfectly formed
but tiny as the flaw in my eye
and equally hard to focus.
~~~
Holy Water
Only the Devil drinks it
to excess. Priests baptize with it
and sprinkle the altar to purge
the traces of disbelief
that otherwise would eventually
encrust it like barnacles.
In our wayward youth Roy and I
stole and drank an entire font
to incite the visions we thought
must follow. Instead of knights guarding
the Grail atop a foggy mountain
we saw men in black robes bending
young boys over communion rails
and sodomizing them so harshly
several died on the spot, their blood
thick as roofing cement. The priests,
if that’s who they were, glared at us,
so we ran and hid in the barn
behind old Mrs. La Roux’s house.
In the dusty litter in the loft
we crouched in terror and heard voices
snarl in a foreign language
I’m sure was New Testament Greek.
We heard the black-robed men hunting
for us, tipping barrels and breaking
open boxes. We hardly breathed
until they left. The old saying,
“As the Devil loves holy water,”
meaning he doesn’t, never
seemed less true. The devil in us
parched for more, though the priests roving
with their pointed sexual organs
were eager to pierce and drain us
of the visions that otherwise
would surely indict us all.
~~~
Amelia’s Cube
In her mournful apartment Amelia
has sculpted a rough wooden cube
of planks stolen from building sites.
She invites us to critique it.
Although the apartment’s walls
of unrequited flesh already
ripple with warning, we claim
to love the cube for refraining
from the threatening gestures
Amelia’s other sculptures
indulge with creaking and moans.
We don’t really love it, but fear
to stir up grief in weepy rooms
no one would ever dare enter.
Amelia removes her green wig
and plops it atop her sculpture.
That humanizing touch helps.
We walk around it, cooing
and making kissy faces.
It’s too big to fit the doorway
but easy to disassemble,
being screwed together with brass
decking screws, each plank numbered
like an artifact. It means
something, makes a point the way
bad art always does. Amelia
observes us observing it.
Her face clouds with crystal sparks.
She realizes that we hate it,
hate its hollow bulk and vulgar
joinery, its unpainted planks
embossed with the artist’s last will
and testament in characters
only the trees that died for
this clumsy object could read.
~~~
Green Fish
With a whiff of borrowed glory,
Amy steps from a burning bush
and flashes me her evil eye.
A rooster crows in the smog.
The sun blinks and withdraws
its tentative April favors.
Some well-meaning volunteer
offers refreshments, wine and cookies.
I don’t take such communion,
don’t acknowledge the cannibal
instinct directed at deity.
But Amy does, gladly, scooping
a handful of cookies and a plastic
tumbler of the cheapest red.
The singe of flesh clings to her,
but I’m the burn victim weeping
fluids I’ll never quite replace.
What has happened here with
social noises abutting us?
Old guilt for old crimes? Crass
and inchoate longings critiqued?
Downslope from this little hall,
formerly a Catholic church,
green fish explore a green brook
sudsing from a cluster of mills
that haven’t milled anything
for the last eighty years.
Amy stretches a painted smile
and plasters it to the wall where
it runs like a spatter of blood.
We pretend that this is small talk,
that the green fish are safely
metaphoric, that the church
doesn’t retain ghost rituals
subtle enough to ensnare us.
The weak sun whimpers. Maybe
someday we can share a pun;
but not today, the stink of char
brisk all over me, and Amy
brimming with the confidence
of one who fishes for green fish
and always catches her share.
~~~
William Doreski has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His poetry, essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught writing and literature at Emerson, Goddard, Boston University, and Keene State College. His most recent books are A Black River, A Dark Fall, a poetry collection, and Train to Providence, a collaboration with photographer Rodger Kingston. His website is williamdoreski.blogspot.com.