Harold Rhenisch

Iodine

or Eating Red Licorice at the Elks' Rodeo Parade, 1963

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Poetry

Wolsak and Wynn, 1995. ISBN: 1-919897-40-1  6x 9  78 pp  $12

 

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Harold Rhenisch speaks with a lyric intensity so powerful that the poems throb and disturb and exhilarate as they move, as George Woodcock observed, "from narrative to descriptive to reflective to meditative." Combine this with Rhenisch's idiosyncratic brand of humour, and you end up with one of Canada's most exciting new voices. These poems alternate between psalms in the speech of contemporary Canada, and true, often tragic, stories of a man who spent 16 years living in an abandoned mineshaft on a mountain between the orchards of the Similkameen and Okanagan Valleys in British Columbia. His companions were 30 dogs which had left the farms below to live with him. Robin Skelton

 

            

               
                  

               		
               
                  
               
            

         

         
         
         
         
         

 HYMN FOR SMALL ENGINE REPAIR
                      
          
         As the faller longs for virgin timber
 
        and the moss crackling underfoot
 
So do we long for our Lord
 
and as the pipefitter longs for Saturday
 
        so he can wake up beside his wife
        and turn over to hold her
 
        because his skin feels like sheet metal
 
and his bones like galvanized iron
 
        so does our  god
        long for lightning all night
        and white rain in the morning
 
so he can watch all the farmers get up
and walk around aimlessly, waiting
 
        not knowing what to do
 
with such freedom!
 
        So does the god of the fouled sparkplug
 
open up a small engine repair shop
in the weatherbeaten garage behind his trailer
 
        It is perfect!
 
right down to the Briggs and Stratton  sign
nailed above the door
and the rusted lawnmowers
 
        strewn around through the cactus
        and the sagebrush
 
When I sit down and think on it
I want to weep
 
        Because when the people start to come
 
in their nylon-mesh hats with the sun-faded brims
their pickups bouncing over the shale
 
        and drag their broken machines before him
 
I want to see him come out
of his dark doorway
 
        Because I want to see the pity in his eyes
 
I want to see how he handles it
 
        when his people return to him
 
I want to be there
          

 

 

 

         
         

            
 

            
            

         

      		
   

   

      
         

      		
      
         
 

         
         

      		
      
         
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