(PROSE POEM)

SUMMITING ON THANKSGIVING DAY

​WILLIAM DORESKI

High above the village where radio and cell phone towers stab at the cold light I meet a man so fluffed in down he can’t speak but stares at me as if considering joining another species. I want to greet him, but the words swab the back of my throat and set me coughing. When I recover my proper flow, he’s gone. Maybe into the hemlock woods crowning the summit. Maybe down the trail toward Holt and Burton Peaks. Maybe he wasn’t there but was the cast-off of my shadow, cast by a conflicted holiday glare. Parked cars at the foot of the mountain suggest a gaggle of hikers, but that thickly upholstered fellow is the only one I’ve met. Now I have the summit to myself. A smell of hot wires seeps from the little shed housing a transmitter. I’d like to see it burst into flames, not because I want to abet terrible mischief but because I’d like to see the smoke and heat ascend to censor the chilly sky. I’m taller than I was when I started this hike. I’m tall enough to see over the village to the Vermont hills beyond. I’m tall enough to see over the shadow I cast that may or may not have become a man. I think he was real, I think the place where he stood is haunted. If I walk through it I’ll feel him tug at me, trying to speak without speaking.
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​About this work, the author said: The prose poem, for me, is a kind of journal-poem, freer in associations and less rhetorically astringent than the unpublishable verse poems over which I labor for days and weeks. Writing it “put the mischief in me,” as Frost said. Writing it, rather than the hike itself, may have made me feel a little taller.
 
William Doreski's work has appeared in various e and print journals and in several collections, most recently A Black River, A Dark Fall (Splash of Red, 2018).