47 William Doreski Writing on the Wall
O
n the wall outside my office a sprawl of spray-paint graffiti alerts me to a language more pointed and abrupt than my own. Still unformed, fetal and smeared, this language has already grown potent enough to arrest my gaze the way Chinese characters in an unexpected location — on the side of a delivery truck, for instance — would. The workman who comes to repaint assumes the right to lecture me. ―Why don't you teach these kids some manners?‖ I want to tell him look, I'm struggling to reinvent the language. How can I urge them to stick to pencil and paper when I'd like to write on water, like Keats, or sign my name to stones breathing molten far underground, or invent a word to blame for the sour taint of the streets of big cities where sulfides blunt the sun's rays and the drugged breath of broken men and women lingers forever, like the Dead Sea Scrolls? Instead, I mouth some cliché and privately mourn the failure of one more struggle to write aloud the prophecy everyone knows but no one can articulate. Spray paint's too definitive a medium for the subtleties of line and contour any new language will have to embody if it expects to bond the flesh a little more firmly to this world, rather than leave us languishing for everything we can't possess. Articulation‖ ~ E. A. Hanninen 2009
William Doreski teaches writing and literature at Keene State College in New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry is Another Ice Age (AA Publications, 2007). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, Natural Bridge. One of his poems was a finalist in the Times Literary Supplement poetry competition. This is William‘s second appearance in The Centrifugal Eye. Contact William