Recognize that handsome mustache? He’s the man that made your nightmares. He made black birds spooky. He put you in the pit. He placed you beneath the pendulum. The evidence of his ingeniousness still swings back and forth above you. The anxiety of his insanity still haunts you in the heart. His works can be compared “to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into everyday life — the hideous dropping of the veil.” — Brian Allen Carr

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The rain today looks more naked
than usual. It bastes the treetops
with id. I dreamt I walked a horse

beside the railroad. The creature shrank
with every step until I stuffed it
into my largest coat pocket.

At home I caught you dissecting
an ordinary garter snake.
Split lengthwise, it resembled

a stretch of the Dead Sea scrolls.
Out of my pocket, the horse
expanded to its natural size

and with its famous Scottish accent
thanked me for the ride. The morning
negates that drama, though.

You hustle the cats to breakfast
and rattle dishes in the sink
to alert me that a new world

has risen from the Atlantic
to replace the dream-world I lived
with ample faith. How can I solve

the simple needs of a landscape
I inhabit barely long enough
to learn how to read its idioms?

The rain kneads the sky till it’s soft
and fluffy. The treetops weep with joy.
You order me to eat breakfast

as soon as the cats have finished,
but I want to run out naked
in the rain, naked as the rain,

and although we have no neighbors
to see, my ripening expression
would surely explain everything.

__________________________________

William Doreski teaches at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, Natural Bridge.

“And the thug takes the girl over to New Jersey in the cab and kills her and rapes her and does all these terrible things to her in front of his prostitute girlfriend. The thug is so stupid, he uses her cell phone, and the cops trace it back to him.” — Bill O’Reilly

#1

Even walking two steps behind you there is still so much sidewalk and many eyes. Blue peacocks. “Don’t look at the stores,” you say. “They have cameras.” The video can capture what I see–the murdered girl riding between your shoulder blades, your thumbprints in her neck. Her white skirt and silver belt. Her red tears. Cold. That’s why you’re wearing sweatpants in ninety degrees. You’re ice. Because she is. You keep cracking your knuckles, the fig cookies smack, your tongue paddle mashing seeds and saliva. Since we left New Jersey you can’t seem to stop eating. Fruits, nuts, slugs. A dim sky hangs starless between buildings. Ticker tape Times Square. BODY OF MISSING NEW JERSEY GIRL FOUND IN DUMPSTER. News chases the lit up letters into the blank. Legs fishnetted, see-through girls walk by in bursts of perfume. Lilac. Rose. Diamond nose studs in the gray face of the night. You stink like homicide.

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