William Doreski's work has most recently appeared in Notre Dame Review, Poetry Salzburg, Ars Interpres, Natural Bridge, and South Carolina Review. He has published a critical study entitled Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors (1999) and a new collection of poetry, Another Ice Age (2007). He currently teaches writing and literature at Keene State College, in New Hampshire.

Nooning at Sargent Pond

The glare on the pond feels sharp
as powdered glass in the eye.
Seated on a root overlooking
the southerly view toward a shore
of pines, I feel too slight and shy
to endow myself with prophesies,
the distance too lithesome to cross

with a single stride. Your life
in the drifting of historic
city streets no longer abuts
mine, the old brick townhouses
too stoic to betray themselves
with bad plumbing, sizzle of wires;
although fire sometimes breaks out

to snuff some loner branded
with surly bachelor habits
and a collection of useless books.
You and I never knew these men
in dusty basement apartments
where native rodent species prowled
the trash stored for morning pickup.

We shared a top floor to prove
we could climb four flights of stairs
without panting. Someone wiser
probably lives there now with dentures
in a glass by the bedside
and electric bill paid in advance.
The pond looks tough enough to walk

across without dampening my soles.
But the scene would bore you, the pines
a prickly Elizabethan scrawl,
the autumn glare too prying.
I unfold my lunch: ham sandwich,
apple, a can of seltzer water.
No one endowed with any sense

would wish you here to see moss
cringing on boulders, hear a quarrel
of crows. I lean into the view
and munch my sandwich and agree
that this moment doesn’t deserve you,
the plated water shimmering
but the southern exposure unsure.



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