Cover: ShosonHarold Rhenisch
Fusion
Photograph by: Diane RhenischExile Editions, November 1999. ISBN: 1-55096-544-1. 100 pages. $17.95
This rancher, bard and magician, worships the sacred ecology of the land from the trout leaping in the swift-running green rivers and the reflective blue mountain lakes to the clattering swaths of locusts which devour his fields. Everything on the ranch provides Rhenisch's muse with intellectual fever to create an ongoing painterly agricultural vision. Just don't make the mistake of putting Rhenisch in the same corral with the other cowboys at the annual poetry rodeo &emdash; he's on an infinitely higher plateau than the grazing herd. Joe Rosenblatt
Sample PoemsShy Deer Ancient Skies The Earth is a Flower, Blooming, its Petals Falling in the Late Year The End of TimeShy Deer On old trails through the scrub, following the ridgelines in the starlight, with the land falling out below, mountain range upon mountain range, each a deeper blue than the last, dropping into fog and the distant sea, Basho tried to lose language in the touch of bamboo and tree and water. It would not leave. Today, as I attempt to shake my words off among the muscat-scented petals of the dogroses like a fish leaping into the sky to shake a flea from under its scales, I realize too that language does not leave, for it is only the words that give a sense of their absence. Like Basho, with no other choice before me, I have gone out to them, and have been accepted, and like Basho I find it no relief: the light comes in low, a fast wind off Starvation Flats, catches the rain on its flank and transforms it instantly into platinum fire. By trying to see through the blue and dancing air, I have come in the end only to the simplest necessities: the river is "river", mountain is "mountain", pines are "pines": words I have never heard before, and have never spoken. The sky plays over my face. What it says I hear out of a corner of my words &emdash; a quick flash, like a deer slipping out of a clearing. Choose another sample Ancient Skies Iamblichus writes: "Art is god exactly in proportion to the perfection of its form." His Mysteries sits on my bookshelf, surrounded by bright-spined poetry books, paper-backed histories, and novels which I don't read anymore. Thomas Taylor cribbed this black leather out of Latin into the 18th century sublimities of English country houses. I had to translate it again, in the A-Frame in Keremeos, the fire trap. Two years of my life I spent fiddling with the old vacuum tubes and solder of Taylor's device, trying to understand the wiring, to mend the short and to find some means of knowing if I was sending a signal or receiving one. I was doing both. In Iamblichus, art focusses light and resonates so we can apprehend eternity. Words are new things to him, undergoing field tests, dangerous and exciting to touch; stamping out the prayerwheels "man" and "woman" in a roaring, repetitive clatter; forced, industrial separations of the sunlight that bathes the entire fluttering plain of the earth in one instant. What was woven of breath and darkness, the flame of sand in the desert, the taste of water and fire, could then be manipulated, instantly. Taylor got in through that door. Men understood machines in his time. You can still find his work in the circuits, in his scribbled footnotes spanning three pages, pushing aside the text, his frustration at the ancient world that still would not hold under his hand, that continually fought against the tension of rhetorical form. Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians is a test on the fuel rods in a reactor core. We who are the poor, the heirs of the Industrial Revolution, not its inventors, who live within the magical field of consciousness like flickering images on a screen, suffer the failure of the containment technology, the meltdown, and the loss of the earth: the reactor entombed in stone, the strawberry fields gone wild under the pine hedgerows. We are the receivers; our prophetic, talismanic consciousness is chemically bound with the structure of the shimmering, visual universe we have made out of the old magical songs to focus their power. The old world may still be alive yet now it is only through the cracks in Iamblichus' form, and Taylor's after him, where light leaked into their rational structures, that the old world can be seen &emdash; like looking through a curtained window in poor light. The modern poem is pacing through the halls of the reactor plant, with the cooling pipes running along the walls; it is the refinement of sensibility within a cage, a world that can be perceived only by its effects on the worlds within the cage, the generation of which can only be guessed at. White-suited men and women sit in a control room watching the reactor hall. The fuel rods are immersed in heavy water. Before the windows lie banks of dials and meters, their fine black needles wavering. Deadly to the touch, heavy electrical cables stream off to light the cities in the night. The limbs of the walnut above my garden are black, edged with soot, a giant pigweed against the cold bird-down of the sky, a flower of stone, aflame. Like the uncompleted lightning of the walnut tree &emdash; the time of its striking never among us &emdash; I have built my home here in a vast well of time, in space, the Christian gift, yet for all my effort only for the short moment of visible history, squeezed between the ultraviolet and the infrared, can space be seen and touched, while above the town every night there are only the stars, in the eternal dream, the ancient sky goddess of the Egyptians arching over the tree, the shudders of wind rippling over her skin; her sweat. Choose another sample The Earth is a Flower, Blooming, Its Petals Falling in the Late Year Above me the alders, older than the dinosaurs, thunderous, lithe, on fire, are turning into smoke. A hundred thousand tadpoles, an unceasing river, swim west in the last warm shallows. For a few hours, in the moss and willows, a thousand tiny black and yellow frogs soak up the last pollen-yellow light as it flashes in horizontally over the earth. Tonight they will burrow into the mud to sleep, their hearts beating slowly, only twice an hour, in the dark. I burn up the year in a fire, walk forward to it, and throw in an alder branch. The sparks pour into the night like water lying out among the reeds, the heron staring down through the heron for the bright fish gone green as water that has grown still as sky. Choose another sample The End of Time for Charles Wright and Jorie GrahamIn the moonlight that once washed through their nights like sap and the mixed tastes of stone and grass, the old ones bound the earth inside 'tree' and 'river' &emdash; circles drawn with a hazel cane on a salt-washed wooden floor. After that, the magical things themselves &emdash; a twig of rowan, a hard black stone &emdash; were brought in, and Earth's power released from them: cold fusion. The mountains splashed up under the moon like waves. The earth buckled up, shivering with delight, arching her back. Today, inside words, captured there, penned, in circles of power, the mountains and the moon vibrate &emdash; like quartz crystals &emdash; and we move through them, enclosed, never touching the wild, untamed name of the goddess. We are invisible and live outside of her power. It takes only a small concentration of matter, sufficiently isolated, to have massive strength. The sun brought down to earth is too strong for us to stand, in any form.
Language is a robotic technology, a tool &emdash; of spiritual manipulation, manipulating that point where the forsythia springs out of fire, where the pink, frost-scarred blossoms on the peaches, and the frozen, morning crystals of ice on the branches, from sprinklers set on them all night to glove them from the frost, are given us: vast machines, industrial packing lines, combines moving across the golden grainfields of ancient seas.
For centuries we have given our energy to domesticating ourselves further and further, insulating ourselves from wildness, refurbishing the rooms within our houses, accepting the imposed structures of our language of control and trying to build within them an earth, but today we can walk out into the lilac blossom light, because the newest words, calving from the edges of the words of speech, entering the earth through the sound of our naked voices, are drifting in the light, anti-matter particles moving into the unified world of fire and perception of fire, negating our mental structures so that they too are wild &emdash; grizzlies foraging for cranberries on the high slopes of summer, the light caught in the hands and drunk like stone, cool, at the very instant of touch. The wind blows and the cottonwoods shiver and shake their leaves. The blue is there, suddenly, arcing overhead, so thin, and on all the trees around, on all the orchards and the wild trees along the river, a thin green veil lifts off, floats.
Choose another sample
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