Two Poems by William Doreski

Poetry – Issue 2 | December 2008

Selling Out

The old house no longer loves me.
The rooms sigh like paper bags.
The boiler crouched in the dark
hisses, warning me away.
The furniture reproaches me
with a certain indignation
the woodworkers who built it
would find difficult to explain.

Even antique glassware regrets
having met me. Swirly orange
carnival glass repels me
with the lilt of an evil eye.
A pair of Austrian pitchers
shaped like moose-heads disdain me
with nineteenth-century arrogance
I’d rather not acknowledge.
Even the bathroom sneers, the toilet
choking with disgust. Too late
to brew a final cup of tea
and sit on the long veranda
and read a Stephen King novel
while admiring the thunder banked
above the Methodist spire.

But I do it anyway, the cup
warming my hands. A few cars
whisk up and down the street but
the storm’s so dark it hushes
even the creak of timbers
as the house tries to expel me
like a splinter under its skin.
I’ll leave when the storm expires,
and won’t look back. The elm,
the last great American elm
in town, holds its ground against me,
blaming me for abandoning
the house of my childhood, and far
overhead a nesting robin
sings away the insolent rain.

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William Doreski’s most recent trip of any significance was a drive from Athens up through Macedonia and the various Balkan nations to visit a distant (third or fourth) cousin who runs a tech firm in Zagreb. Then on through Budapest (necessary food stop) to Frankfurt and home.William’s work has appeared in various online and print journals and in several collections, most recently Another Ice Age (AA Books, 2007), available at Amazon.

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Literary Bohemian

Poetry – Issue 2 | December 2008