William Doreski		Looting All the Saxophones With a twitter and hoot a burglar has looted all the saxophones from the music shop. Clues abound: a tatter of red wool snagged on the busted lock; cigar butt ugly as a carnivore’s scat; a half-drunk can of Pepsi spangled with fingerprints. A wail of tenor sax halts conversation. We stare into the stilted night sky, unable to affix the source of that unrepentant be-bop. Maybe Pine Street. Maybe the hill behind the synagogue. The tune rattles our collective memory, broken triads shuddering like ice floes crashing over rocks. Silence. As the first pink shiver wrinkles the east a different sound alerts the deer who’ve shivered down to the half-frozen river to drink. An alto sax rehearsing a Cole Porter tune. We can’t agree which one. Night and Day? Easy to Love? Ridin’ High? In the Still of the Night? Attuning ourselves to melody challenges our official dignity, but dawn revives our sense of purpose and we shout for the criminal musician to snuff that song and surrender. In response a soprano sax trills something from Webern or Schoenberg and we cry aloud with frustration and draw our pistols and wave them in the air— the cold light glinting on the barrels as broken high notes flutter overhead, daring us to shoot.		Brisker than Budapest Don’t you feel how tactfully the dark smothers Keene, New Hampshire, when it thinks no one’s looking? You claim this brick and clapboard mill town’s brisker than your native Budapest: the restaurants better, the yard sales far more vigorous, even in winter. Dead furniture decorates the snow banks. Bottles and cans punctuate the sidewalks littered during last night‘s riot of petty and part-time drunks. You laugh that Hungary’s much drunker than Keene, that the recent scarcity of cheap potato vodka solves none of that nation’s problems, that folding and toting away the Iron Curtain let no light into a superstitious landscape you’d rather not visit again, even to recover your ancient and famously angry mother. I respect your angle of vision, but Keene lacks castles, monuments— only the Chabott coal silos, black wooden cylinders a hundred feet high. We agree to admire these abandoned functions the way tourists always admire structures no longer in use. But the dark is so stifling this winter, and the lamplight so vague. The drunks lack enthusiasm, and the howls of chained dogs slowly freezing to death remind you of the vampire tales you find endearingly foolish when applied, with humor, to me.