Reidel - 3 poems

James Reidel

Catholic Girlfriend, 1975  

—for Heinrich Böll

The summer clouds of Ohio still resemble the High Pamirs

to this day. While I have never seen the High Pamirs, they

came to mind first, for I must have read about them in Soviet

Life, when I owned a subscription, when I didn’t like things

the way they were.

There are just things you know, even without any real

experience. I would think if I were an experienced climber, I

would surely want to climb such clouds that rack up to such

heights, such majesty. But I would be satisfied with a tour

bus view of Ismoil Somoni when it was still called “Peak

Communism,” which is the impression I had when I saw

its white summit floating over Brown County, as I drove east

on State Route 32. It was near sunset, after a thunderstorm,

and I was not alone with my thoughts then. I could share

them if I wanted. But I did like my mind being read.

Look at that, it’s like we’re going on a holiday, up into

the mountains, I said to her, the one woman in whose basket

I put all my eggs from that time.

I’m going to a party school, she said, repeating something

I said dolefully, for I wasn’t going to follow her there. She

already forbid it in so many words, so much silence.

Later we pulled off at a service station and, while I

pumped the gas, she used the restroom. Across the road was

a field full of the early evening and this slow sift of

cottonwood seeds, their motes catching the light the way

dust does in a sunbeam through a window. The cottonwood

seeds could have been snow blowing off the High Pamirs or

their stuffing, since it was just my imagination. But I did

have a real thought: This is how we are made and this is what

we become.

After I paid for the gas, I found her sitting in the driver’s

seat. She said she wanted to drive the rest of the way to

Athens.

It’s not like you’re my father, she said, and I’m a year

older than you.

I must have looked a little glum to her on that note.

So, I’m going to give these to you now. I dared myself,

she said. I went in and bought them in the men’s room. I

thought they would be fun. Like those little boxes of four

crayons, which they give kids to color with in restaurants.

Kids, I said.

She dropped the foil packets in her hand into mine.

Just for you, she said. And one is red.

She saw some of the college town on our first day. I saw very

little. I just wanted the night to fall and get it over.

We had no money for a motel. But there were no rooms

anyway, it being a reunion week. Since I had packed a tent,

we pitched camp in a nearby state forest for the night.

She said it would be better if we waited.

And you could always change your mind, I said, what I

really held out for.

The next day we took a long walk and came upon a choir

of Amish women singing under a great rock overhang. Their

voices were beautiful, sweet, serene. When she asked me

what the name of the hymn was, I said it was the Song of Job.

You make it sound like I’m looking for a bible college,

she said, “looking” meaning the rest of the day in Athens,

when she left me to tour empty halls and the library, when it

was quiet on Sunday, where she saw herself reading on

Sundays, and the dormitories, where she saw herself sleeping

with whomever she brought back with her the night before.

She returned to find me lying across the half-abandoned

railroad tracks, which still ran through the school back then.

She found me holding back my tears and looked in both

directions as though for help or for a train.

Do I look like your father now, I asked her?

No, she said, back inside the tent, back in the state forest, as

the High Pamirs gave way to nothing but those lunar

whitecaps you see around the moon as the weather changes.

But it was pitch black for us, with that dulling smell of canvas

and nothing but crickets between the long silences, the

dwelling on it.

No, you don’t look like my father, she said again, because

he would have remembered matches, a flashlight, and that I

would have liked to see the red color on you, how it looked on,

like a clown’s nose, she said.

Three Prose Lyrics for November  

1. Sunday

Now the dawn is where it should be, where even a child

knows where.

The sun’s spokes fall into place at the right time and in the

right order,

The right light, temperature, the right white balance of the

warmest orange and yellow leaves of the year.

You could almost buy a postcard of this morning in a

museum shop.

Look at what countless others did virtually, simultaneously

with the slightest adjustment of a dial,

They turned the numbers back at the behest of authority

     and without question,

Stirred up those hands that have an almost cruel underbite,

That of a broken pair of scissors, perhaps misused to pry

     the lid off a jar of cocktail onions.

One finger after another raised the little iron hairs of hours,

     minutes, seconds like magnets,

Painting the night into a different corner of the day,

     into a funny beard of itself.

You can almost still feel the pointing fingers while

     you slept,

For being so last to complete the task, to have given it a

    thought.

2. Black Tuesday

The voters stick the paper punches in your eyes.

They stick them in your heart.

They see wax dolls draw the curtains on themselves.

They use a sharp pen or pencil to mark the circle or

    square,

The two shapes that are the choice and as hard as they can,

    with their fists until the point almost breaks

Or a fingernail on the screen (They’re here!), which

    makes it even more just    black    magic.

They wish that they could vote more than once and

     some do,

So as to stab you in the back for good measure.

They do so inside a thin booth that trembles like

     cardboard.

They hide from the ankles up—where else have you seen

    such privacy,

Such being alone with another animal need,

Such a secret kept so well that your identity is no secret

    downtown,

To be known only by your shoes?

Then they murder their ballot,

Today’s menu of devils for their victims, ill will.

3. I Live at the Expense of Others,

Others live at the expense of me—even as the leaves fall in

    the wind from one yard to another.

A great mattress could be stuffed with fiat leaves printed by

    the president for leaf blowers,

For jumping from the bedroom window woke that it will

    never be a day of rest again.

A gingko copiously paves the grass with gold while the red

     maple rains red stars.

Tulip trees paste their false petals to any wet surface.

The bur oak leaves look like worn leather soles,

A color only seen when the kneelers in church were seen

     in use.

Everything is going to plan—baby steps, I tell myself as I

     kick and wade through the mountains

Blown as loud as everyone can in unison,

Raked, and pulled by blue tarpfuls to the curb,

Each according to their leaves and mine.

Baby steps—because I need to get back inside.

Graphic Novel in a Moleskine Journal  

1.

The disturbed lawn reveals the once rich veins of earth-

worms, the spoil tips of the overmining, and the desperation

for new material. You can only take so many orphic footsteps

and the descent into irony — or the ascent just to trample

someone else’s sand castle on this opposite shore, on the

other side of the grass, a deserted beach of its roots and soil.

2.

There should be no shortcuts, no short stories, no children’s

book, no where - the - wild - things - are clawing you to the top.

Your mole never stops. Your mole cannot say good night to

the moon. Your takeaway should suck the oxygen from eve-

rything printed to either side, that any so - called damage, any

so - called ruin is contingent on human presence, its percep-

tion, and the category 5 of both presence and perception,

projection. But you are too weak to go the distance and you

can already see the cutaway of your little hero’s den, a rugged

individualist, but an eyeless one (note the pun) with purely

decorative gold wire rims resting on the end of his pink star

nose. In one full - spread, his forepaws, like baby’s hands,

would be drawn apart in a helpless gesture, but drawn with

this resentment – resistance in long nails no less manicured

than the mole Shelley’s claws in the portrait on the den wall,

holding a quill to the line Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair).

3.

The last page would reveal the “Mole Above” after there is

no more belief in Him, the acceptance that He doesn’t exist,

that there is nothing here to see. His is the easiest panel to fill.