Poetry: Your Feckless Smile by William Doreski

Your Feckless Smile

 

Your smile detached and flitted off.

We search in the Luxembourg Garden,

the Tuileries, the cafes along

Boulevard Montparnasse. You fear

it has adhered to German tourists

or smeared the eloquent stained glass

of Saint-Chapelle. I worry

that it has disgraced itself drunk

at an embassy party where

the stuffing comes out of shirts.

 

Why can’t you discipline it?

To avoid frightening the world

I never smile. No one expects

my approval, no one invites me

to galas where the champagne flows,

no one greets me gladly in the street.

My expression avoids extremes

so I never have to explain them.

 

Isn’t this why we live in Paris

with the Seine in suicidal gloom

the cathedral shelled by fire,

terrorists gunning down their critics?

No sunny Impressionist scenes

for us. If you hadn’t loosed your smile

we would be too anonymous

to suffer existential angst,

our bodies so secret that even

naked we’d be invisible.

 

The alerted gendarmery searches

alleys, bistros, cafes, parking lots

in the dusty yellow suburbs

where rumors froth with lechery.

Next time refrain from flirting

with the world. It doesn’t flirt back

but takes what it wants with a sneer,

leaving its best friends toothless

and sopping up muck through a straw.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His forthcoming book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021).  He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.