William Doreski

Noel's Dock

2011-10-09T13:33:00.001-07:00

West wind scuffs the length of the lake
and forces U-shaped ripples
onto shore. Noel’s dock, a gray
tablet, thrusts headlong at the view.
We could launch a little sailboat

into the wind and tack and stagger
uphill to the far west shore, then glide
seamless and uninhibited back
to the dock as the autumn sun drops
into its slot in the hills. The dogs

would rush to welcome us back.
The slop of breezy water
racing us to the sand beach
would mock drinks slurred in glasses
as neighbors gather for a party.

They’d ask how we liked sailing
after Labor Day in wind too cold
for them to brave. We’d grin and shake
hands all around, unabashed
by our out-of-season pleasure

or by trespassing on Noel’s dock.
We’ve no dock of our own to tie up
our boat, don’t even own a boat.
Our property borders a marsh
too sullen to support the flattest

bottomed canoe, so we envy
this long view, this breezy dock
pointed so confidently downlake.
The hills bulked against the south shore
have begun to undress for autumn,

but the larger effect remains warm
enough to invite us to sail
or fish or paddle or swim
or practice that easy drowning
indulged with little regret.

Sailing Alone Across the Atlantic

2011-08-19T03:46:00.001-07:00

Myra rises after midnight
clutching moonlight with her paws.
Her pointed muzzle grins. She leaps
the length of the bed and bullies
the other cats to the floor. Tiny

as a kitten, kinetic
as a kitten, she burrows
through the dark to the kitchen
to shriek for a snack. I tunnel
deeper into sleep, but you rise

in a huff of bedclothes and stagger
down the hall. I dream of food:
pizza, cheeseburgers, onion rings.
Toxic meals that even in sleep
clog my arteries. You rouse me

by tumbling so heavily back
to bed the broken old mattress
sighs and pops another spring.
I dream of shopping for shoes
and belts and a plush suede vest

I’d never wear in waking life.
We’re sinking further into debt
than even into this sorry bed.
But Myra prances back to cuddle
between us, her big ears flapping

like batwings. She loves this bed,
her empire. I dream of sailing
alone across the Atlantic.
The sails, shaped like Myra’s ears,
whisper full of wind the color

of Carrara marble. The ocean
exhales motley grays and greens.
My boat’s slow. I abandon it
and walk the last thousand miles
on water smooth as agate. Myra

snores her little old lady snore
and dawn breaks like the sight of land—
Spain or maybe France brimming
at the edge of sleep where even
the bravest travelers wash ashore.

Out of Scale

2011-07-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

By a small-town green, a warehouse,
four stories huge, bulks like nightmare.
A railroad siding curves to meet it.
Boxcars crouch at big sliding doors.
Half this structure looks abandoned.
Blank windows, crumbled brick

at the cornice. I park to watch
a pair of skateboarders challenge
traffic on the town’s main street.
They leap the grade crossing and clack
past me without a glance. The rails
look dull, flecked with rust. Weeds

strut between the ties. The boxcars
prove this railroad’s still alive, though.
How can children thrive in towns
so cramped and sullen? What happens
if one of them casually browses
through the poetry of Rimbaud?

Luckily the clatter of skateboards
stifles dissent. Luckily
the curve of the railroad siding
limits perspective. The warehouse,
being so out of scale, suggests
how little aesthetic pleasure

one need take in the larger world.
The trees on the green look shy
and apprehensive. Houses shaded
by the warehouse look small enough
to absorb the residue of dreams.
With the skateboarders safely past,

I drive across the railroad and up
the hill, out of town, avoiding
the cop who has stopped a speeder—
blue lights flashing as a woman
with bold red hair declares herself
innocent of time and space.

A Foam Hat

2011-06-28T05:08:00.001-07:00

Twirling like a Mexican Hat Dance,

hat-shaped, big as a sombrero,

a ring of vegetable foam,

decayed and fermented from years

of leaf-fall, whirls in a pool

below a tiny waterfall.

I’d like to shovel it up

in a coherent mass and ship it

to a museum of entropy

where tourists could admire it

and scientists could measure it

to confirm their favorite theories.

But it would collapse like angel

food cake, leaving a yellow scum.

The brook has been heady with rain.

The many little waterfalls

have yellowed with debris skimmed

from the forest floor. This foam hat

formed when no one was looking,

when leaf-matter clumped and clung

to a notion of symmetry

that survives its DNA.

Insects skim the busy current.

Striders brave the whirlpool and cling

to the rotating structure, their flat

paddle-feet pawing for a grip.

They’ll probe the foam for creatures

small enough to eat. A fish

hardly larger than the striders

noses from under the hat, flashes

its rubbery tail and disappears

downstream in a hurry. I skid

across the slippery rocks back

to land. Safely on the trail,

I note how firm the foam-hat looks

from a distance, how reverently

the circling water dandles it

as if a coronation

were about to claim this space.

Monson Two Weeks After the Tornado

2011-06-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

Mounted police scout for looters.

The big Sunday light explores

the ruins, exposing wires, plumbing,

and pictures face-down in plaster dust.

The ridge where the tornado came down

looks like a badly shaven chin.

Walking the length of Main Street,

I note blue Condemned tags stuck

to almost every standing structure.

The pizza and coffee shops thrive,

however: the motorcycle crowd

and the state troopers expressing

burly appetites by the slice.

I’m ashamed to photograph a scene

so anticlimactic with angst but

a tattooed young woman struts

along in tiny skirt and halter,

so I follow because behind her

I can travel unnoticed. The high school

lost its roof. Opposite, a house

smashed flat, while next door a big

gray Victorian went untouched.

On a rise, the modern gym built

by the academy a few years

before it moved one town away

retains only a steel skeleton.

The school’s oldest brick building

has lost two of its three stories.

The church at the head of Main

cropped its steeple onto its lawn.

I’ve seen too much. The shudder

that passed through this village

still distempers the atmosphere.

The collapsed supermarket groans

like a vampire’s coffin. I turn

back toward my parked car and let

that decorative young woman proceed

without escort, the rubble

of plaster and downed trees coughing up

centuries of history in her wake.

Timid Bear

2011-06-18T05:14:00.001-07:00

Timid bear.

Ghost Tree

2010-12-19T04:47:00.000-08:00

All night its ululations rave
through its hollows. I fear
it will uproot and stalk the last
mile to my house and press
its grimace to my bedroom window
and demand I awaken and ease,
somehow, its stale desperation.
I don’t know what killed it or why

it has assumed this countenance,
but its oval gaping troubles me
the way the wind troubles whatever
remains of its pith. Last spring
a few buds exuded, a few leaves
trembled on the tips of branches,
but they fell early, leaving the tree
agape with that terrible grimace.

Now its warped geometry howls
with a grief I haven’t felt since
my oldest friend died of whiskey.
Awoken from a dream of unloved
and unfathered children, I loom
at the window and dare that tree
to present itself. The cry
of winter fills black and white spaces

etched by the glow of a planet
sinking in the west. The moon set
hours ago, and cold dawn plots
to cancel whatever the night owes
people like me. Back to bed
to cuddle with a purring cat,
the shriek of the ghost tree fading
as the wind shrugs out to sea.

Thomas Jefferson Apples

2010-10-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

Jefferson’s Variety

Still on the trees, apples tough
as knuckles absorb the gloom.
The light over Fall Mountain
looks like the marbled endpapers
of a nineteenth-century book..

Biting into a wormy apple
called Thomas Jefferson after
its original grower, I taste
something cosmic, a distance
both sweet and bitter and only

faintly sour, a place far away
yet too familiar to fear. People
chat among the trees, swapping
hybrid apple stories, tasting
various non-forbidden fruits.

Pears and peaches, one plum tree
share the orchard plot. Chewing
Jefferson’s hybrid by myself
in the lukewarm atmosphere,
I lean against my shadow and trust

the shaggy grass to cushion me
if the light shifts and I fall.
The voices approach. Two friends
round the path and approach me.
I look as blasé as possible

and toss the core in a weed-pile
to compost for the future.
The orchard-keeper asks if I like
his favorite old variety. Yes,
yes, I like the way it complements

the sullen mountains, the sickly
but apologetic sky, the smell
of approaching rain; and the way
it nourishes a sense of loss
ornate as the laden trees.

The apples came from Morningstar Farm in Rockingham, Vermont. The photo overlooks Morningstar's pastures toward Fall Mountain in the distance.

Mushroom with Tiny Slug

2010-10-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

This scene isn't as dramatic as the one Robert Frost described in "Design," but I thought it a pleasing composition.

Sonny Rollins at the Macdowell Colony.

2010-09-19T09:28:00.000-07:00

Sonny Rollins speaking to the mob after receiving his Macdowell Medal, August 2010.

Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes

2010-09-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

Charles Simic's collection of poetry with this title was an inspiration to many of us in the early 1970s. This may be that stone. I'm sure it has been taking notes on me.

Such an Infernal Contraption

2010-07-30T06:25:00.001-07:00

A heavy but graceful steel frame
supported by four tiny casters.
A single big clockwork gear

and something like a ship’s wheel
of equal size. I dare you
to turn that wheel and engage

this rusty but potent machine.
What does it do? You don’t know?
Turn the wheel and the planet

shifts on its axis, tilts more
to the right. You’ll hardly notice,
but the winters will get longer

and the summers will shrivel one
or two degrees. New Zealand,
however, will warm a little,

and the Antarctic icecap shrink
by several million cubic yards.
You think this antique device

doesn’t work anymore? Try it—
go ahead, risk our grandchildren’s
future by changing the climate

with a single turn of that wheel.
You claim it won’t budge because
the rust has lingered for decades?

I’ve a quart of oil in the trunk
of the car. Let’s douse this thing
and get it working fluently;

and maybe by turning the wheel
the other way with heroic
grunts and groans we’ll reverse

the industrial revolution
and undo some terrible curse
we hadn’t known applied to us.

Zombie Jesus

2010-06-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

As we pass the Jaffrey graveyard
beneath a thunder-knuckled sky
you note the lime-white statue
of Jesus lurching across the lawn,

marauding. He must be looking
for a fresh grave, you insist,
one with the brain still edible.
You think Jesus is a ghoul?

No, a zombie, and besides,
that statue isn’t really Jesus
but a zombie neatly dusted
with cake flower so he can hide

in sight until conditions ripen.
Lightning impales a hillside
a mile away. Thunder rocks
our little car. A sheet of rain

drags across the view and occludes
the clumsy figure prowling
among the overpriced monuments
grim towns like Jaffrey prefer.

At the stop sign I check the mirror.
Jesus stands in the road staring
with blank white eyes. Can he see us?
I turn north and drive as fast

as the baptized highway allows,
past D.D. Bean and the bridge
over the Contoocook. Jesus
won’t follow us. If a zombie,

he’s too sluggish and awkward,
and if a ghoul he’s a necrovore,
and won’t come after the living—
even those tenderized by sin.

Elmwood

2010-06-01T08:38:00.000-07:00

At this junction, railroads crossed
before the ’34 freshet
collapsed a couple of bridges.

One remains, unused but intact,
curving toward the Bennington
paper mill. The other’s a path

by a marsh of beaver lodges.
We note one large pine felled
by excessive overbites, many

saplings trimmed to handy size.
In a daze of vicious deerflies
we turn back along the abandoned

roadbed to find the car we parked
half a mile away. Nothing to say
about the horrors of the world

today: the threat of nuclear war
in Korea, oil spill in the Gulf,
the shooting of relief workers

off the Gaza coast. We slog along
with silence masking our faces,
plowing the plush air ahead of us.

When both railroads still functioned,
trains ran from Keene to Nashua,
looping around the Dublin ridge

and crawling through these marshlands
to pause at a station here, then pass
a ball signal and trundle east

toward Greenfield. You don’t care
about the geography but focus
inward, on grief you won’t share

because no man understands.
The roadbed we’re walking ran south
to Peterborough. You don’t care

if it ran to Moscow and Kiev,
the spangles of deerflies jewelling
your regal but gray-streaked hair.

Santa Fe in Vermont

2010-05-13T03:36:00.001-07:00

At the Bellows Falls crossing
a leased Santa Fe locomotive,
blue and yellow, backs a string

of cement cars across the river
toward the North Walpole yard.
You would enjoy seeing this stray

machinery from the Far West
groaning across the rusty bridge.
It invokes your California years,

the dust of the Central Valley
inflamed by the Santa Ana winds,
the Mexican pickers sweating

in fields that stretch from one slab
of mountains a hundred miles
to the other. Did you feel the land

tremble where one railroad crossed
another, subtler than earthquakes?
Did you admire the gray and red

Southern Pacific diesels cruising
from Oakland to Sacramento?
Maybe you don’t find railroads

as interesting as Thoreau did—
the hoot and stammer inscribing
the spirit of commerce on the green

silence of Walden. Sometimes
he hated its vibrancy and greed;
and sometimes I think the etching

of railroad on landscape ended
Jefferson’s agrarian dream for good.
But today in cloudy Vermont light

this alien diesel engine smiles
with effort and I smile back
at it; and maybe you also,

as you crouch over powerful texts,
are smiling with intuitive glee,
amused by what’s so childish in me.

Old House by the Lake

2010-04-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

That shabby old house by the lake:

green flaking paint, trees tucked

so close the trunks shoulder up,

the roof encrusted with many

seasons of leaf-fall. A nice lot—

two hundred feet of lakefront

behind that fringe of brier and shrub.

Of course it’s haunted. Why else

trespass in those dank gray rooms?

Look at how the sofa slouches

below that amateur painting

of sheep mowing a bristly meadow.

Sniff the thick air and appreciate

the mold and mildew that smother

the reek of excrement. You shudder

because in your native land one

expects to find a corpse or two

brewing behind the furniture.

Here the dead keep their distance

and only their stories remain

to bore us. Yes, that’s a face

peering from the dark at the top

of the stairs. We won’t go up there.

That face has retained that fixed gaze

for many years. Maybe a ghost,

maybe a living person annoyed

by our presence. Let’s go outside

and consolidate our psyches.

The stink of this interior

both depresses and exhilarates.

Look back at the upstairs window.

Note how dark and smoky it looks.

Good thing the trees fence this house

so closely. We wouldn’t want it

to drift even a few yards further

for fear it would poison the lake.

2010-01-26T07:14:00.000-08:00

Slow Depth Plotting

On my birthday snow has buried

my favorite junk car in the woods.

Naked seat-springs glower with rust.

The steering wheel, black cracked Bakelite,

looks futile. The overall slouch

of the ruined vehicle suggests

that “rendezvous with destiny”

New Wave filmmakers adored,

although they never convinced me.

Meanwhile I’ve missed my rendezvous

with you, a glancing blonde presence

in the corner of my eye. Even

in the woods beside the river

I catch a flash of pale blue dress,

too flimsy for upcountry winter.

Your love of mime exposes you

one sly gesture at a time,

each imperceptible, ill-defined.

The river looks solid enough

to support an armored division.

Its snow-smoothed trough bears prints

of a dozen modest animals

busy with animal business.

No black hint of current betrays

the slow depth plotting. The dam

five miles upstream at Bennington

stalls ambitions rivers sometimes

allow to overwhelm themselves.

The junk car has rested here forty

or fifty years. It came to rest

with sculptural integrity intact.

The car in which you died, however,

crushed itself so humbly nothing

of its original form survived.

Do you remember the slam and smash

that collapsed your skull? You dodge

and feint in the corner of my eye

and your presence on my birthday

explains our divergent lives.

For Margaret Fuller

2009-12-17T07:02:00.000-08:00

A windy dream reminded me

to remember your name. Drowned

with husband and child off Long Island,

your carcass devoured by cod

and haddock, you left one book,

Women of the Nineteenth Century—

a sample of your genius to goad

our late and belated era.

I forgot your name because age

misfiled a dozen Margarets—

colleagues, athletes, cocktail party

handshakes. No lovers, I’m sure,

but an engraving of your profile

reminds me of Alexandria,

whose murder amid her children

just recently stopped resonating

in a milieu that no longer cares.

With his wide-eyed naturalist’s gaze

Thoreau searched for your remains

and found half of Ireland littered

on the beach. The dead reminded him

that everything is better alive,

a lesson he’d apply to white pines,

mast-high and upright in Maine,

by attributing souls to them.

I forgot your name so arose

to look it up. What did you write

that wouldn’t infuriate Hawthorne,

who resented “scribbling women”

and rendered you as Zenobia,

a muscular Blithedale irritant?

Sophia, your friend, would avenge

his sexism by scribbling over

his journals after his death.

Margaret Fuller, you married

Marquis Ossoli, bore his child,

and drowned as deeply as Emerson’s

Nature recommended. Next June,

if I survive this brittle cold,

maybe I’ll find a bone on a beach

and name it after you and other

intellects now hung in the sky

a mile or two out of reach.

Self-Portrait as a Snapping Turtle

2009-06-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

Highly desirable, the shell’s
more comfortable than the collar
of a dress shirt. The rumpled jowls
frame an arched expression bolder
yet more benign than my old one.

The pebble-grain complexion
suits a mood that requires many
years of foraging to effect.
Tiny eyes peer through black-rimmed
glasses I’ve drawn on the photo

to prove to friends it’s really me.
Despite their mineral glaze
these eyes see further and deeper
into pond-murk than I could
with my nearsighted hazel pair.

The hog-nose juts straight ahead
with an arrogance no human
could assert without invoking
the audible laughter of fate.
But the horn-hook of the upper jaw,

the “beak,” as some would call it,
justifies investing my soul
and ego in this sultry portrait.
That jaw can sever a finger
as well as drown a duckling.

It could rip any book to rags
and sneer down any argument.
Its fixed eloquence resists
the subtlest formal critique.
Snugged in a muff of hide as tough

as jerky, I’m irresistible,
a force rather than a creature,
my fixed gaze and my appetite
prehistoric but slow enough
for friends and foes to avoid.

2009-06-04T12:26:00.000-07:00

Cecropia Moths Mating

At midnight the chrysalis splits
and the female moth emerges,
her six-inch wingspan rumpled,
her mouthless segmented torso
limber and curved like a smile.
The male’s there waiting for her.
With a shudder of fragile patterns
they mate, knotting one bowtie.

I watch from only inches away,
pointing a camera to capture
this world-class pornography.
Too gradual, almost motionless,
this sex act defies the logic
of wasting most of a life cocooned.

Spangled with blue and red knobs,
the rubbery green caterpillar
that last summer crept from leaf
to leaf with gourmet intentions
seemed a bustle of self-propulsion
compared to these excruciating
creatures locked in a gesture
no human form could emulate
without collapsing into boredom.

Overhead, Canis Major crosses
the sky at a silent gallop.
The Dipper pours thousands of stars.
Whole galaxies snuff as forces
apply urgencies of dark matter
to the space we thought was empty
until physics taught us better.

The moths by pairing have perfected
their pattern of camouflage
and don’t require my guardianship;
so after I’ve snapped my photos
I walk away convinced I’ve seen
nothing my gray old passions
couldn’t have projected in dreams.

Cecropia moths mating

2009-06-03T12:45:00.001-07:00

2008-11-04T11:11:00.000-08:00

Coast Guard Beach

The crosshatched light has suffered
all the way from Spain. Wind rattles
the flags at the coast guard station.
A few kites brave the gloom. Your footprints
impress little tide pools. Placing
my feet in them, I feel pebbles
roll like eyeballs in whorls of sand.

A framework spiked from driftwood
huddles against the bluff. Carven
“LOCALS ONLY” warns away
the casual tourist. Charcoal
and a ring of fish-heads and shells
assert that varieties of hunger
distinguish species from species.

Despite the presence of your footprints
you’ve never walked this surly beach,
never committed yourself to solving
the presumptions of breaking surf.
Seven hundred miles offshore today
a tropical storm is rending charts
to detour shipping north and south.
If I followed your footprints
far enough that storm would impale me.

Framed by the driftwood structure I note
a shadow precisely like yours
elongate against the grain of light
and wonder that you’d impose yourself
so boldly on such primal matter.
You gain nothing but worship of stone,
weed and shell, an effort spent
to impress and comfort us both
in some distant parallel plane.

2008-08-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

Spirit Faces

Touring graveyards in Chester,
Grafton, Westminster, I consider
the spirit faces engraved
by eighteenth-century carvers
probably inspired by Indian
petroglyphs at Bellows Falls.

The hot afternoon looks insipid,
cloud-hung but pale and naïve,
the Great American Holiday
unfolding in thousands of cookouts.
Not a day to regard the dead—
their faces, round and dubious,
rising from the weathered slate
like soap bubbles blown by a child.

Their expressions embody doubts
not only about the afterlife
but about the aesthetics of death.
Even those rimmed with sun-like auras
maintain at best a tentative gaze
back into the world they’ve left
and forward into the airiest
notion of something better.

Here’s one clearly dropping a tear,
the large but simplified eyes
blank with self-pity. And here
a married couple grimace
in their separate but paired orbits.
And here angel wings levitate
a surly and unwilling old soul.

And last, in Middletown Graveyard
in Grafton, an inflated face
with pinched little features crowned
by carefully marcelled hairdo
and wearing a heart-brooch centered
under its chin attracts attention
from a pair of branch-bearing doves.

The heat dizzies. I slump on the grass
and note that the ranks of headstones
totter not like a mouthful
of unkempt teeth but like bundles
of illegible manuscript left
to fade in some further dimension
where no one has learned to read.

2008-06-17T13:21:00.001-07:00

Photographing the Barns

The farm dogs greet and wriggle

like sausage in a pan. We’re friends.

I’ve come to photograph the barns

leaning into the view to the east,

where Fall Mountain bobs above trees

scruff and jagged as my beard.

The barns offer fistfuls of splinters,

rusty implements, buckets, sleds,

a Volkswagen in faded red

with a “Stop the Arms Race” sticker.

Bags of fertilizer and cement

huddle out of reach of weather.

Spiders decorative as doorknobs

waddle across elaborate webs.

The silo exclaims itself

in unpainted planks worn black

by tireless seasons. I point

and shoot and expect the results

to justify ignoring the dogs,

who regret every lost petting,

the chickens wriggling in dust baths,

the honeybees knee-deep in pollen.

The barns pose as formally

as possible. The sunlight inching

across the chipped and faded paint

feels tonic enough to salvage

the saddest of my varied lives,

The dogs, Spud and Jupiter,

nuzzle up. I pack the camera

into my tote bag and drop

to my knees to look more acutely

into their brown ceramic eyes.

Dog-thoughts blossom. The barns

sway in the solar wind. Chickens

ripple like living footballs.

Apple trees flutter, dropping petals,

and the early snow peas ripen.

The entire farm is a muscle

working itself to flatter

the simple demands of the land,

and the dogs and I tremble

as something below responds.

Broad Brook Garage

2008-06-03T14:02:00.000-07:00

This little service station in Broad Brook, Connecticut, has long been one of my favorites.

Photographing a Junk Auto in the Woods

2008-05-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

Burned and rusted to a turn,

the Studebaker has relaxed

into the forest. Birch saplings thread

through the punched-out windows.

Wasps have woven a nest in the springs

of the roasted upholstery.

The bakelite steering wheel has cracked

in an attractive snakeskin pattern.

The hood yawns with boredom. Beneath,

only the engine block remains,

an iron tombstone. Every part,

every wire, tube, or device,

carburetor, generator, vacuum,

fuel, and water pumps, long gone.

Posing you draped on this wreck

I revel in the contrast

and hope my photographs expose

the essence of both your wintry

post-Slavic grin and the grimace

of this fifty-year-old sedan.

You’re enjoying this notion

of art as devolution—

this vehicle having exhausted

its utility now embracing

the role of public sculpture.

But you too could achieve

the stasis of art, your dental work

perfected, your scruff of hair tinted

a lovely Halloween orange.

The light whispering through leaf-fall

and sudsing of the river flatter

your sleek, uncompromised figure;

and as you lean into the photo

you eclipse the morbid old car

and warp the space-time continuum,

rendering the past moot and the point

of light puckered in the camera

inexorable as a kiss.

East Deerfield

2008-04-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

End of March at the railroad yard.

Track branch off like broccoli,

the burnished rails bright enough

to critique unshielded eyes.

From the overpass I focus

on a string of diesel engines

parked near tall rusty silos.

A pair of sand towers suggests

salt and pepper shakers on stilts.

This Sunday the abandoned brick

signal tower looks like a tomb.

The ladderwork of yard tracks

hardly looks sturdy enough

to serve a viable commerce.

I’ve photographed this scene before,

but never caught such absolute

stasis, so much failed momentum.

The yard stands almost vacant,

no more than a dozen freight cars

looking useless in the glare. I kneel

and peer straight down at the tracks

passing under the bridge. Imagine

leaping to the roof of a boxcar

as the train passed. Surely I’d slip

and tumble between the cars

and many wheels would slice me

into portions modest enough

for the naked soil to digest.

But I won’t try it, not today

with no trains moving and the black

diesels gazing down their snouts

as if deep in contemplation.

I snap my photos and enjoy

the trill of sun on polished steel,

then rise from my artistic crouch

and stretch myself like a carnivore,

the rails complex as the rib cage

of my best and latest kill.

Crew Change

2008-03-24T05:39:00.000-07:00

At Palmer a pair of freight

locomotives parks beside

a halted Amtrak passenger train.

One’s green and yellow, one sports

black and white zebra stripes blunted

with a bold red nose to contrast

with the blue and silver wash

of the Amtrak engine. Crew change,

of course. I snap a few photos,

bracing myself against a wind

strong enough for camera shake.

All of my photographs become

self-portraits featuring red

nosed locomotives, main lines

skewered toward the vanishing point,

passenger cars as graceful

as lengths of sewer pipe. I press

the shutter to assert myself

against the faded spring glare

that threatens to absorb me.

The locomotives grunt and groan

and the paired freight units creep

away around the curve to hide

in the New England Central yard.

As the Amtrak train bulls ahead

a bored passenger spots me

peering from the embankment and waves;

and I'm feeble enough to respond,

relieved that I’m still visible,

at least to a stranger’s gaze.