William Doreski

Calder’s Mobiles Don’t Hang Straight

Calder’s mobiles don’t hang straight
but sidle up to the planet
with wry but confident angles

I envy but can’t emulate.
The one hanging in your kitchen
looks like a tiny thunderstorm.

Posed there, you tilt and veer sideways,
confounding my approach. I snatch
a beer from the fridge and pretend

I’m too manly to let art
as fragile and tentative as Calder’s
shift my vision even an inch.

Your whole apartment reeks of art.
Drawings primp in off-white mats.
Figurines in marble and bronze

squat in speechless dolor. One splash
of oil painting cowers the sofa
on which I’d hoped we could splay

not like lovers but comrades
determined to resolve the world.
You acquired your mobile from the man

himself, who in his last years touched
your childhood with tiny implements
essential to kinetic sculpture.

The rest of your collection deployed
as your elegance formed itself
from air, water, fire and earth.

I wish I had known you when stones
first cracked in your presence
and rivers slopped over their banks

and storefronts coughed up trinkets
to pave your way through Harvard Square
where your early triumphs occurred.

Calder saw this coming and planted
his mobile to observe and relate
your effects by shifting its angles

subtly enough to mimic
the way you balance entire worlds
on the tip of your pointed tongue.




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William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and teaches at Keene State College. His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Atlanta Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Worcester Review, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural Bridge.