Harold Rhenisch
Sono
Nis Press,
1982. ISBN: 0-9192 03-84-1 6 X9 104
pp $5.95
Poetry
He is a poet who shrewdly travels to the ends of his metaphors. Laurie Ricou, The Vancouver Sun
THE MILL I In a fluid darkness bent by stars, all direct lines are curves of stone cracking on the river bottom, shudders of light learning wetness, flesh, stone turned inward to learn the hardness inside stone. I held this truth once. Do you want truth? Myself, I have stopped asking for truth but ask for simplicity and it confounds me. We fall, staright, hard, into the sun of where we've been, and come out flesh, not space, but yielding stone, earth. It is a flying leap. I have walked the great gravel bars, I have lain in the black furrows as the cold came up, I have watched the dusk come up, stood silent at the first shivering star. My year is a restless pushing at skin until I can lie on the frozen earth. For spring, also, must learn from where it comes, another truth. II Beside me runs the river, its flow cloudy with loess. I sit on sand and stones and begin again. I reach to learn anything, to learn why we tremble in the pale light, the air too clear, and yet too murky for me to see or hear more than my own earth. How far have we come or gone? It is cold. I throw a stone into the current. It drifts. What is time to us? We are time, the most difficult answer. First star of night, millwheel, I have come to learn something from myself, or&emdash;I have come here to forget myself again. Star, we have gone the different ways of differing flesh and yet still must speak to one another. There is nothing else. We have come through another year and know even less. We have forgotten our deepest names. The leaf falls; the body rots; the moments end. This is not a truth but something every man must stand against in his own time. Hard knowledge: only love brings life to fallow flesh. Such simplicity confounds me. top