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Second Shift
At Pratt & Whitney the reek
of the creosote wood-block floor
filled me with dread of fire and doubts
about the work ethic. Employed
from four to midnight, I slathered
vanes with dyes and peered at them
under black light, measuring cracks
and flaws against standards bound
in fat, government-issued books.
I enraged an Air Force colonel
by rejecting his favorite parts,
refusing to endorse their use
in live engine testing. The stink
of creosote maddened everyone,
so tempers flared like magnesium
and fistfights broke out beside lathes
gnawing expensive alloys
and foremen yelled at uniforms
and vice presidents insulted
each other, seeding heart attacks
that would fell most of the company
before retirement intervened.
I rode out the stink and shouting
by crouching in the dark with
ultraviolet lamp, measuring stress
in parts essential for keeping
jet airplanes aloft. Outside
my workspace, big men debated
the cost benefits of testing
until the parts in question failed.
The engineers demanded it.
The Air Force opposed it. The foreman
said he'd do as he damned well pleased.
Meanwhile the wooden factory floor
exhaled its ugly fumes and sickened
the entire work force. At midnight
every car in the parking lot throbbed,
and the mob of us, breathing exhaust,
drove home to lie as flat in bed
as possible, hoping no jet planes,
crippled with anger, fell from the sky.
Older Than the Odyssey
As I sweep the leaves from the driveway
with a long coarse-bristled broom
bulldozers across the road
are hacking house lots from wet clay--
remodeling the landscape
to pack the wallets of investors
who don't understand why Odysseus
blinded the Cyclops with a stick,
arousing the wrath of the gods.
But in danger of being eaten
I'd also poke out someone's eye,
the one eye centered in his forehead,
with the handle of this broom.
I'd feel the jelly pop and slather,
hear the cry of the monster explode
in a language no one has spoken
for three thousand years. I sweep
as hard as I can but the leaves
stick to the asphalt, oak leaves tough
as the parchment of manuscripts
even older than the Odyssey.
They're illegible to everyone
except me, my Cyclops eye scanning
the brambly little characters
as leaf by leaf the narration
enshrines the most plausible lies.
It's All About You
We note how the postmodern green
and puce trim of skyscrapers
soils the Manhattan skyline
the way the scrawl of jetliners
soils the sky.
- We stare at gaudy
and shake our heads as children weep
for toys so expensive no one
is good enough to deserve them.
We smirk when women hail taxis
and traffic refuses to halt
for their imperious beauty,
their tall heels creaking and splayed.
Downtown we peer at the faces
of politicians and find them
poorly evolved as amoeba though
equally adept at survival.
We perceive that the stock exchange
smells like an ancient bathhouse,
admit that we envy the traders
with their concise and jerky gestures.
We both enjoy the hard men--
attorneys, salesmen, accountants--
swinging their briefcases
against the knees of strangers
in the subway.
- I like you
but although you do it daintily,
the way you do everything,
I dread the rigor of your laugh.
Demise of the Western Canon
After staying up all night plotting
the demise of the Western Canon,
I imagine that Dante, Homer,
Shakespeare, Kant, Freud, Stevens and Frost
are clutching their intellects in shame.
Only Dickinson survives the purge,
her brittle foursquare stanzas
brambly as last year's raspberry patch.
No one will ever cite my essay,
but I've enjoyed condemning--
not on feminist or post
colonial grounds, but for the crime
of warping the minds of children--
what one of my deflated
specimens called "all life's grandeur. . .
something with a girl in summer."
Too bad the cold rain will quench
the heat I've generated.
Too bad the blowing trees will douse
my rage with pollen so fine
it'll penetrate to sinuses
packed like sandbags around my brain.
The sneezing and wheezing I'll emit
will sound like Homer's Greek
in a nineteenth-century schoolboy's
stuttering maw. Meanwhile the light
will rise with some reluctance,
unsure of its reception,
and my neighbors will feed their horses
as people have been feeding horses
since the Heroic Age, when bronze
clashed with bronze and languages
bled from every pointless wound,
making the world slightly woozy
with too much requited love.
William Doreski, a New Hampshire poet, has had work in various e and print journals and in several collections, among them, Another Ice Age (AA Books, 2007). These poems were written in the dark early hours of the AM, usually before the moon set. (September 09)