REVIEW AMERICANA

 

Fall 2010

Volume 5, Issue 2

https://americanpopularculture.com/review_americana/fall_2010/doreski.htm




WILLIAM DORESKI

 

December Entropies

 

Snowshoeing through lumbered hills
I detect a fresh terror
in deer tracks that stumble through drifts

and leap and land splay-footed
on modest slopes where cut boughs rot
under two feet of cover.

I slip-shoe down to the Mill Brook
and trudge along its frozen surface
to explore the beaver pond built

last summer.  The lodge, a mass
of snow as tall as me, resists
imaginings evinced by fox-tracks

all over the dome.  The beavers,
unintimidated, doze
for the winter, recalling the roar

of chainsaws that competed
with their own tree-felling skills.
Come spring they'll find the pond

where they left it, fox and snowshoe
tracks erased, surviving pines
garnishing indifferent sky.

The sky lacks indifference today,
however. Snow-showers whisper
into the void, and the light fails

early.  Tramping home in the dusk
I feel the distance attenuate
while my snowshoe-tracks describe me

a creature so long obsolete
that the cruelest of biographies
can't even begin to exhume me. 

 

 



 

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