"Orphic August Landscape"

Spongy boletus mushrooms gather around a pine stump like mourners at a funeral pyre.

Although they’re edible enough, I’m not tempted to claim them their poise and attentive look too poignant for me to disturb.

The brook rattling down from hills the color of antique jewelry expresses itself without shame. Insects with terrible antennae creep up and down the tree trunks.

The last landscape Orpheus saw before descending into Hades looked much like this one but trimmed with belief in the gods.

If I could conjure up such faith I could decipher the stony voice of the brook and understand why following it to its source high on a slope with a distant

Limestone Country and Other Poems by William Doreski view of Boston would answer questions I haven’t learned to ask.

I would also know why the mushrooms ring the stump, why wispy threads of their mycelia have burrowed here and not in the richer soil beside the brook. The mushrooms are only the fruit of this effort. But like Orpheus they linger atop a gloomy underground in which their great dreams fester.

Limestone Country and Other Poems by William Doreski