New prose poetry by William Doreski

Upstairs in the library old men in seersucker jackets, their hands speckled like snakeskin, shudder over the problems of theology.  No need to remind them that flesh is no more ignorant than the pages of those books, and far more transparent.  They've surely read their livers spots, their knobby warts like stones in a field.
            But books, unlike the body, pulp down to the sort of candor in which Augustine confesses that God is the ultimate absence and Blake reminds us that worlds tremble, deflate like beach balls, and crawl under things to die.
            The heavy blond wood tables, the unabridged dictionary on its pedestal, the smell of glue and sulfide paper all conspire to lull us into trust of antiquity.  The old men move their lips as they strain through dusty bifocals to puzzle out the Greek or Latin they labored to learn in their youth.
            Most of them are broken-veined, bronzed from too much sun and liquor.   Summers on sailboats in Maine or Nantucket and winter trips to Italy have rendered them conversant with the familiar deities of sun and sea.  But the nether gods have failed to teach them that the silence of age is hard-earned, that the scars they bear are their own, that faith is difficult and pitched so low only those who've grown old and deaf in a good cause may hear it murmur in the blood-rush under the skin.