Cover: Chuckchee Star Map, 1905 Click here for a larger pictureHarold Rhenisch
The Blue Mouth of Morning
Oolichan Books, November 1998. ISBN: 0-88982-173-9 5.5 x 8.5 95 pp $14.95
In these fabulous poems, between passionate elegies for Charles Lillard and Robin Skelton, Coyote the transformer, Coyote the trickster, the shape-changer, is busy doing "the real work" after dark, behind the scenes &emdash; changing his mind, rearranging landscapes, dismantling cities of the imagination, making room for new worlds, new languages, and freeing us from the burden of history. In his various disguises as poet, as magician, as composer, rancher, philosopher, clown, Rhenisch transforms an abandoned earth, an inhospitable earth, an earth cheapened or lost, into one of fecundity. Ursula Vaira
Sample PoemsThe Real Work Paradise Found Morning Fire The Lovers The MessageThe Real Work Coyote works hard, unstringing the barbed wire from the fences on the plateau and herding the cattle out at night while ranchers swim helplessly far out at sea. Some nights Coyote is content to nip at heels as cattle thunder and bellow through marsh grass, burrs catching in their hair. On other nights he dresses carefully in turquoise and black leather chaps edged with silver, with boots of rattlesnake and fish skin, dons a sweeping hat with many tassels, and is ready just before dawn. As a cold night wind flows through bunchgrass and poplars, a late moon breaks and floods along the edge of the sky; Coyote mounts the herd bull, and sitting on the rippling muscles of the great beast's white neck, grabs its horns, and rides through the ranchyards singing old songs passed down by his family in Chihuahua. Those are the mornings when the ranchers sense him, for when the green-feathered roosters crow, the ranchers step onto their verandas, hear music and see the air ripple as if their cattle are passing through it. Sometimes Coyote ties pink and yellow feathers to the tips of the bulls' horns, dresses in his own skin and sits demurely on the backs of the cows as they follow the bulls out into the world. Sometimes Coyote does not touch the barbed wire. Those are the nights when he dresses in gold and carries a red cape over his shoulder. Those are the nights when he steps into the ranchers' dreams, flares the cloth suddenly, and once the ranchers charge after him&emdash; to discover they have no guns there, in their dreams&emdash; whips the cloth away, and vanishes back into the dark where they will never find him. It is this moment Coyote longs for and has been working towards continuously. When it comes he sits on top of a pile of round bales and squirms with excitement, listening with an ear cocked for what might happen then. Choose another sample Paradise Found Back in the '50s Shakespeare used to run a skidder out of Anaheim Lake, but now he's opened a lawnmower repair shop amidst the old singlewides and rusty Chevrolets of Lac La Hache, and charges by the hour. The walls of his shop are plastered with sonnets, printed in the pale colours of the '40s, the paper yellowed with the years. The floor is dirt packed hard as cement, littered with old greasy gears, piston heads, and shining carburetor needles. Shakespeare is in the back by the grinder, a blue welder's cap covering his skinny bald head, a spray of sparks shooting around him while he grinds the slag off a half-molten piston to the tune of the low-pitched roar that sinks off the stone. Down the highway from Shakespeare's Lawnmower Repair John Milton, whose eyesight has been restored by swimming through the river of silence, has settled his daughters in a fly-tying shop. There is nothing fancy here, and nothing is arranged for tourists, but John has been fishing in Lac La Hache and Rail Lake and the glacial and horsefly country of the Chilcotin for sixty years and has learned a thing or two in that time. Most any day you will find him in an old Coors Lite T-Shirt, a pot-belly hanging over his jeans, peering over the tops of his bifocals at delicate watercolours of chironomids and mayflies that look like fairies, that look able to grace us with a love more intense than cut flowers, and which he painstakingly copies with deerhide, coloured thread and wood-duck feathers. If you want to find his daughters you will have to canoe onto the lake, for they spend their days there, clear-skinned, scooping the latest hatch off the water, where wings gleam white against the deep without light, thoughts floating on the first age of the world; and paint them on heavy rag paper with handmade sow's bristle brushes. This is their share of the work now, and after his passage through blindness John is glad of it. On Mondays John hangs the closed sign in the front window and goes onto the lake with his neighbour. In the middle of the lake, Shakespeare cuts the old Evinrude and they drift with the slow current; he drops a line with lead weights and a lurid pink and green plug over the stern and is content to lie back watching the pattern of the clouds drift across the gentian sky, but Milton is not. He stands in the prow and with deft flicks of his wrist casts a fly far out onto the still black ahead of them, into absolute emptiness, into the pure definition of water, and with trembling fingers and a pounding heart waits for a fish to rise and strike hard. Choose another sample Morning Fire There are cymbals and dancing on the night lake. In the villages men wear wooden masks and fill their pillows with snow. From a fallow field, Mozart walks in, followed by crows. In the blue air before dawn a crow stands on the stone sill of each house, preening its feathers. Mozart is in a tavern by the river drinking the last beer. As the sun pierces the blue fog the crows lift off house by house, just before the yellow knife of light slashes over them, and spiral high into the sky, carrying away the dreams of the people within. At dawn, Mozart staggers into an alley, the sun glaring suddenly in his face like a cardinal placing an ear of wheat in Mary's hand as she cradles her golden child in a cathedral of hand-cut marble and white stone flowers. By then the crows are gone and the streets filled with morning rivers of fire. Mozart battles up them alone. He has been doing this for centuries, and for centuries people have been carving masks of wood to fit their faces perfectly and to represent what little they can remember of their lives. Every morning they burn away. Choose another sample The Lovers When the locusts come in green clouds out of the desert, people bolt their shutters and sit in the mauve dark. If they must walk out they clench an iron nail between their teeth, for the taste of iron is the exact mirror of the desert; it is safe passage. Few people venture out: as the locusts strike the windows, a driving rain, they pace restlessly between long discussions of snow, the philosophy of totemism, and the healing of wounds with hands laid on forehead or breast; except the lovers&emdash; they meet in the loud whirl of locusts; they crush them underfoot as they run down the highways, under the bare trees of the avenues, away from the city into the hot stones and the name of rust. To be a lover in the city is the most public act. The regulations of the regents, the patents of clock makers, the charts of astronomers, the stories of merchants and thieves, are private to lovers&emdash; a sense of personal dissolution&emdash; but the brush of lip, the curve of breast, the depths of whisper, the swell of cock, are printed in newspapers&emdash; as were headlines announcing victory, treachery, and speeches from the commanders in the years of shame. "This afternoon under the plane tree . . ." "Your kisses are sparrows in hawthorns in July . . ." "When I saw you in the dawn light . . ." The people who read these papers are not lovers; the lovers have no time to read. They lie together as the sun streams through the grasslands; they are inseparable. When people read the papers the click of pages turning reminds them of the arrival of locusts on a searing August wind. They read each page with a tremor of excitement, the grasses growing in far fields of their fingers trembling. Choose another sample The Message From the city men lead camels into the shifting sand. They are watched for hours from the highest towers by men in red robes, until they vanish, tiny, into the mirroring wall of heat&emdash; then the watchers cry out with a long, drawn-out wail of joy sung deep in the throat. The travellers have hawks on their wrists and messages in their pockets. They are on their way to the king. The message they bring is a tiny silver box that when opened in daylight, as the sand whips in off the streets, contains the sun, and when shut contains instantaneously its absence, which was there before it. It is the simplest thing in the world, but also the most inscrutable. The men let the hawks go free; the hawks return with empty claws; while the king is unaware that a message is on its way from the world. Choose another sample
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©Harold Rhenisch, 2002
Harold Rhenisch: <rhenisch@telus.net>
