Cover: Shoson

Harold Rhenisch Fusion

Photograph by: Diane Rhenisch

Exile Editions, November 1999.  ISBN: 1-55096-544-1. 100 pages. $17.95

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 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 Poems

Shy Deer
      Ancient Skies
      The Earth is a Flower, Blooming, its Petals Falling in the Late Year
      The End of Time

Shy 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.
             
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            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.
             
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            The End of Time
             
	for Charles Wright and Jorie Graham
 

In 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.

 
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