Your Head Has Detached
Somehow your head has detached,
and so I have to tote it around
to meetings, classes, and lunch.
You speak as vividly as ever,
and even munch slices of pizza
with the same purple hunger
with which you devour Hegel
and Wittgenstein. Embarrassing
to carry a bowling ball bag
around campus; but maybe you tired
of breast-feeding half the world,
bored with plantation novels,
sick of your fiberglass cottage
on a lake of prehistoric fish.
At dusk I refrigerate you
because your bloodstream no longer
throbs with heart-driven verve.
Yet the next day you’re brazen
as a doorknob, lectures prepared
and papers somehow graded
by the ghost of your handwriting—
a precise if cramped little scrawl,
I’ve told the rest of the department
that next week someone else
will have to usher you here and there.
Where’s the rest of you, anyway?
Why can’t your body resume itself?
Of course we’re intellect-driven,
but the gap between self and means
shouldn't widen so dramatically.
Here’s your afternoon class. Students
hide their snickers behind laptops.
I’ll re-bag you in an hour. Coffee
black, two sugars: I won’t forget.
The November light in the windows
flatters your wheat-field hairdo,
and your lecture on Heidegger
rings every word like a coin.
The Many Gravestones
Finding the many gravestones
that bear my name tires me.
This old garden cemetery
stretches for miles. Driving
while scanning the monuments
blinds me to the sea-creatures,
giant aluminum worms, that plop
on the roadway and weep small stones.
When I run over them and burst
a segment or two they exhale
perfumes that would sicken me
if I weren’t preoccupied with lust.
Night will soon bring instruments
that slather in case-hardened steel.
If I haven’t withdrawn by then
the treble of birds will excite
and the iron gates will swing shut
with a sound of single hands clapping.
My name, borrowed or stolen,
has stuck under layers of lichen,
the bright orange variety. Scraping
each instance takes an hour or two,
depending on how deeply engraved.
The cemetery light’s always dim,
even in the bonfires of noon.
It never gets fully dark here
because phosphorous traces the paths
spirits take on epic journeys..
Parking a moment to pour coffee
from my Thermos I note that cries
of nineteenth-century dead float
in spongy masses above some tombs.
They must have been affluent
to amass such powerful voices.
No one will listen when I die,
which is why I have to scrape away
my name wherever I find it,
even if slate, granite, marble
resist, claiming certain privileges
because of geological age.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, includingRobert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.