a poem by William Doreski
squalling on your lawn ignored your vast scholarly indifference and mistook you for the mother-type. Watching you handle the creature the way you’d fondle a hornet’s nest I’m worried about its future, worry that you expect me to dandle the child on my lap as it grows in wisdom and celestial grace. Boy or girl? Neither, you insist, but a universal being dropped by a pagan goddess The reek of the diaper suggests mortality, but you’re encouraged by the rolled eyes and gummy smirk. You believe it already knows you from a past life hung with tapestries and freckled with complex mosaics, gilded domes raking azure sky. I’m phoning social services to snatch this child before you name it after one of Jupiter’s moons, dooming it. You murmur in German, Russian, Polish. It understands webbing its jaw reminds me of rivers ditching Siberia, flowing north to the Arctic where oil rigs spike a howling wind and men drunk on vodka topple into gray slush and drown. You see the sort of father I’d make-- so surrender the infant now before you scar it with stories from Gogol and Dostoevsky, confusing it with narratives too restless to parallel its life. |