Harold Rhenisch Dancing With My Daughter

Sono Nis Press, 1993. ISBN: 1-55039-037-6  6 X9  94pp  $9.95

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Dancing With My Daughter is Harold Rhenisch's fourth collection of poetry. Characteristically, the poems are alight with an ardent lyric impulse which is all the more intense for being shaped by an elegant restraint. The book is divided into three sections. The first shimmers with the surreal incandenscence of the poet's dreamworld. This is a rhapsody. Yet when the poet performs a dance with his daughter, it is as measured and grave as a gavotte. The second section of the book considers the meaning of the past as it persistently and powerfully permeates the present. In the third section, the poet constructs a viable bridge between the artist and the natural world around him.Finally, these poems are a celebration of the living past and a passionate present where all movement &emdash;in water, in the dance, in wind and in art&emdash;is a statement of re-creation. Angela Addison

Reviews

Drifting north from the Similkameen to the Cariboo, Rhenisch is a kind of Steppenwolf who manages to combine both the populism of wanna-be work poets and the subtleties of "poets' poet." The orchardist and the haiku poet both believe in the value of pruning, and there is a farmer's economy of effort which lends emotional and intellectual incandescence to very line Rhenisch writes. Reading him always makes you feel as though you're sitting at a farmhouse kitchen table late at night with a stack of books and a glass of something from the cellar, kids and stock safely abed, and an hour or two to talk quietly about what it all means. John Moore, The Vancouver Sun

Rhenisch puts the whole of the poem down so carefully on paper that it becomes a wonder.Prairie Fire

Sample Poems

Dancing With My Daughter
      Water
      A Grammar
      Drawing Hands

 
            DANCING WITH MY DAUGHTER
             
 
I have buried myself in the land
that was ours and is lost
and have lived with the cherries
that burst out from the trees
at the nodes of intense pressure
all up and down the limbs.
Now I want to sit among friends.
 
The body's surface fire
gathers itself into the breast:
dark bruised bursts of flame,
brought into the animal rage
of the body drinking
inhuman time:
 
but what can we make out of fire?
Fire? I want to sit among friends,
as the year dies in broken weedstalks
and the pine on the sandbar thunders up
taller than the mountain,
defiant,
 
and the snow blasts over the dark house.
 
And for friends I have to look to women
who are wasting away their time,
and men who drink wine
in their gumboots
in the unheated garage,
in celebration of the fire in the shale,
the inexhaustible flame.
 
We are a people leaving the land,
for the comfort of old songs:
time, strength, soil, light:
old nodes of pressure,
the goddess stepping barefoot
into the god's dance.
 
I do not know if it was the words
that weakened us, 
their community that destroyed 
us: beauty, soul, honour, poetry, art,
the old emblems: beauty,
form held in balance, the body
stripped away
from ineffable light, the gulf
of dark; soul, 
the mirror of poetry
in the perfect form
of measured time; and honour,
the personal guarantee for death;
that separate poetry from art:
 
old, banished words,
cheap porcelain down at the junkshop,
old bent tin frames, old dolls
with taped-up arms.
 
I would like to think the wind is a broom tonight,
cleaning us out, but it is not:
the leaves are sodden and limp,
and empty of light, and will not catch
that cold and leering fire.
 
In the world without music,
I wanted to sit here tonight to remake this earth
in the image of a balsamroot
burning yellow in the green night fields,
with a soft wind spilling through the grass, warm,
the gentle waste breath of ants
in their opium heavens,
not to repeat the old words again,
the terrible old words
of possession and judgement
and power:
 
meaning, logic, compassion;
truth.
 
I want to sit here tonight among friends.
 
In this burning world, this sea of blue stars
smashed across a stone floor,
I have been given a daemon with a lash. 
He wants to teach me one thing,
and he wants to teach it to me well:
 
we have no friends;
we are alone;
there is no shared world;
love, like God, is dead,
pressed flowers between the pages of a book,
Keats' hand caressing our cheeks as we dream,
childhood lilies remembered in old age,
candles, matches of memory,
brief flares in the unending dark.  Night
is an idol cast into stone:
there is nothing there.
 
My five-year-old daughter
dances with me in the kitchen,
laughing, her eyes bright.
That, I have taught her.
 
It's all I have.
 
I would like to say
the lash will not reach her,
that as we dance 
the imposter's lash will strike my back
and not her face;
that those welts are mine.
 
I can say it,
but all I have to say it with are these burning words;
 
and leaves, plastered against the cold ground,
so flat they have lost dimension and mass,
eternal, that belong to none of us,
 
won't ever shield her from that. 
             
Choose another Sample
             
 
 
            WATER
             
 
 
This is not one of the Sefiroi
that is burning, phosphorescent,
in this dark room&emdash;the shape
of the night is showing
through the form of the room&emdash;
but the scent that wafts from it
is the scent of hay:
it is a thing of light,
a nest for birds, a jug
that will hold no water:
it is the body.
 
Mountains and trees are also
thin filaments of light:
the mind, perfectly attuned,
will look through them
and see Nothing&emdash;they are
the heavy seedheads of grass
in rain;
 
as soon as the body steps
out of the door
and the wind moulds itself
exactly to its face, it ceases
to be the body,
but is the threshing floor;
 
music is continually fighting
to return to its first
note, but no longer has within it
the form of a tree&emdash;it can form
the song of a tree, but can put forth no leaves,
gently fingering the light
like angels. 
 
I have just stepped out the back door
into the sky. The light
in the leaves under the apricot trees,
and the light off the water
on those leaves, to hold
the frost from the roots,
is reflecting the sky:
the sun is burning within them&emdash;
but cooled, and still.
 
If you break apart
the sacred geometry of the Sefiroi,
you get no more than a heap
of light on the ground,
that quickly seeps out through the grass
until it is a skin
that so perfectly fits the shape
of leaf-blade and gravel
that it has unlearnt
itself&emdash;and all so quickly
that the mind does not see
that it is there, or even
that it was within its hands.
 
With such visions the body
walks down out of the bush,
dark with rain, smelling of clouds, and simply
to see the light burn up over its face
and to feel the shadows of light
burn down its throat as the door opens,
knocks lightly on the door of the mind
and asks for water. Music too
tends to unlearn itself
when thrown into the grass. 
 
The body sees all, and because
it does not know what to make of it,
and with what it knows
cannot return into the water
the mind has given it
in a white pitcher,
but can drink it,
and so, bitterly, drinks&emdash;rain,
and wind through alders, the moon
shivering, a blur&emdash;and so
shivers, it dreams;
and those dreams are the mind.
 
If you break apart
the sacred geometry
of the mind, you get the body:
it smells faintly of a flame.
You can learn much from it,
like water poured down the throat
out of the hands,
directly into the rough wood-wind
notes of a tree,
so coarse they seem at first
without relation to water.
             
Choose another Sample
             
 
 
            A GRAMMAR
             
 
1909.  Keremeos.
The first ranches are broken up 
into mortgages on hard terms and orchards, 
newly planted, that will not pay 
before 1919.  Irrigation flumes run dry
with bad engineering and the strain of heat
this land no longer knows.
The sage lies withered on the hills.
It is the old story:  Kelowna, Peachland, Summerland:  
lots sold on the bottom of Okanagan lake&emdash;
the whole lake bottom neatly drawn up 
and sold&emdash;sight unseen&emdash;to prairie men, new Canadians, 
as an escape from cold and a way of life 
that never was.
 
All the old varieties are gone:  Snow, Wolf River, 
Belle de Boskoop, Maiden's Blush, Cox Orange,
that got to England, and home, no better than pig-fodder, 
and nearly ruined the dream:
Victuals and Drink, Winter Banana, Raspberry Sweet:  
all gone, all useless to this land:
flavourless apples, soft punk:
Northern Spy, American Mother, Golden Russett&emdash;
that could not bear the heat
and grew tough-skinned:  abandoned, and men with them,
in favour of Spartan 
(Macintosh X Newtown, Summerland Research Station, 1922), and Red Delicious (orig. Hawkeye, 
Starks Bros. Nurseries, St. Louis Missouri, 1890's)&emdash;not dreams, 
but the harsh reality of industry
without market:  export, production, wealth:  a grammar.
 
Give those first farmers their due:
I've picked New York Macs
off a tree planted in 1909,
and though I do not wish
to glorify a deadly foolish past,
green as two day old hay, they had a flavour
and the scent of earth&emdash; 
a huge, half-dead snag of a tree&emdash; 
30 trees to the acre, to last a lifetime,
unlike the Macspurs I picked earlier in the day, 
95% red, 95% Fancy or Better,
money hanging on the trees,
bland and watery,
picked from the ground, 
850 trees to the acre,
on rented land, to last ten years&emdash; 
realities of the production of a product
in oversupply, 1981, East Kelowna&emdash;
the product is dreams.
 
It was called building a country,
and building a life:
 
we cannot build these things now
except by accident;
that first luxury is gone:
there is no wealth
but what we draw from this soil,
no families in England paying to get us out
from underfoot:  we are gone,
lost to the far side of the world:
our wealth is in this soil&emdash; 
and whether in the trading of dreams
for dollars or for dreams,
the choices are clear.
             
Choose another Sample
             
 
 
            DRAWING HANDS

for Robin Skelton
                

 
I wanted to draw hands, that touch fire.
All I had before me were Michelangelo's
yellowed studies and my short thick hands,
and shavings and rubber wisps. I thought of your hands,
rich with the watery stones of the earth,
carrying the weight of history through the years
as they shimmer and clang with their moon-beaten power.
 
Like the students, whose hands are mutilated,
mis-shaped, warped, with spindly,
bent fingers or grotesque swollen thumbs,
my hands lay recognizable
only by the intent. Yours are famous. People
come now not to hear your poetry
but to see the ancient haunting power of a hand
that swept the granary floor clear of stars
and began to thresh the dark into skeins of grass.
 
I walked out tonight with my five-month-old daughter
along the diked and flood-green river
under a blue heron moon. The leaves
flashed huge and silent&emdash;
our thoughts arranged in song, flaring,
footseps in the dance,
the wild unbeaten light. You sit
awake tonight, your fingers
over the pages scattered out before you,
listening too through your hands.
 
The silence opens into time.
The crystals form around the core of fire.
 
The hands reach out and touch and bless.
             
 
Choose another Sample

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