How Complex Geometry Gets

by William Doreski

The angles at which forest trees
lean into each other suggest
how complex geometry gets
before it resolves anything.
You and I meet at angles
even more oblique than birch
leaning into the boughs of oak.
On Main Street clutching book bags
we avoid a fatal meeting
of mutually brown eyes. We crouch
at an iron café table
and speak at angles so acute
they behead the strangers around us.

The afternoon sickens with cloud.
Shadows and other subtleties
fade as thunder trips on Beech Hill
and topples full-length on the town.
In Penn Station twenty years ago
I saw a child crushed when a man
rushing for a train fell over
a suitcase. As I describe this crime
your face becomes a hole through which
a downdraft funnels with a howl.
The child looked broken all over,
whimpering for several minutes
but dying before the cops came.

Despite your love of Dostoevsky
you’ve never heard so casual
a disaster recounted before.
You’d rather not hear details,
but the rain blazing in the street
prevents your escape, and the weight
of The Brothers Karamazov stashed
in your book bag anchors you
to characters much riper than me,
and the angles at which we’re sitting
add up to a perfect horizon
of a hundred and eighty degrees.

Posing as Rimbaud

by William Doreski

A French-speaking city plain
and geometric as Saigon
but lacking tropical languor.
The boulevards sigh as a breeze
from the south excites the plane trees.
The war receded long ago,
leaving pockmarks and a hole
in my body too subtle to fill.

You don’t remember armies glinting
in the streets, gunfire voicing
a thousand objections. Too young
to register the angry verbs
that closed the theaters and cafes,
you slept away the atrocities
and grew up in a silence
to which aggrieved parties agreed.

I had volunteered to pose
as Rimbaud, a figure outlined
in smoke and history. My wound,
a theoretical effect,
bled only when someone observed.
Yet unlike the soldiers buried
under white crosses outside
the city, I lived an epic
without self-sacrifice, and thrived
in the details of my retelling.

You grew up to smile on this city,
invoking its primary colors,
while to me it will always be gray
as a sunken ship. But meeting you
on the boulevards and sharing
café au lait encourages
my belief that only fiction
ennobles us, polishing the scars
until they shine like nickel plating,
endearing us to the psyche
that’s otherwise eager to kill.