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Enumerate the Ores
by William Doreski

Mineral resources couldn’t help
the faces stained with anthracite
as they stumbled from the boxcars
and lined up naked and quaking.
Yet I enumerate the ores:

bauxite, galena, molybdenite;
and ponder stress fractures spreading
across the suffering continents
and cobwebbing into psyches
fluctuant with mist and dream.

I duck into my daily shower
and hope the cyanide that felled
my Central European cousins
hasn’t lingered in the mainstream
of western intellect where clocks

with porcelain faces challenge
our biblically promised life-spans.
The mineral resources groan
and crack underfoot. I pity
the elegant crystals exuded

a million years ago: oxides
and sulfides, calcium, carbon,
and boron combining to foster
a language too dense to swallow
without choking off our smiles.