Harold Rhenisch Winter

Sono Nis Press, 1982. ISBN: 0-9192 03-84-1  6 X9  104 pp  $5.95

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 Poems in celebration of winter as the centre of the year. The consideration of man's relationship with the land through the creative acts of sowing, tending and harvesting is at the core of Harold Rhenisch's work.

He is a poet who shrewdly travels to the ends of his metaphors. Laurie Ricou, The Vancouver Sun

Samples

She Stands in Old Grass and Laughs 
      Rain Spills From the Pages of The Green-Backed Book of the Hunter
      Words in January
      Out in the World
      The Mill

 
 
            SHE STANDS IN OLD GRASS AND LAUGHS
             
 
 
 
 
She stands in the heavy couchgrass
beneath the old linden.
She bends to smooth the grass.
 
Over the deep creek, the red-throated
ring-necked pheasant
creak at wind and the yellow fern.
 
In November, it is dusk
and the linden moves in the wind.
 
 
 
I walk the borders of the black loam
to assure  myself of spring&emdash;
for spring is always moving.
 
Pheasant explode at my feet
and I stop, in wind and leaden light,
and listen. Wind.
 
And then stones rumble
among trout and willow and ice
and moan and lie still.
 
She stares, and cries into the darkness
beneath the linden,
Do you hear the snow coming?
 
Hello?
 
Do you know the sounds she makes?
Do you know the stories the leaves tell
of the first month of winter?
 
Have you seen the transparent
light she looks into?
Do you hear the sounds
the wind makes?
 
Do you listen?
 
I come in, at dusk, with burrs and fern,
and hands full of small, dark seeds,
and shake off the dark.
Behind me, pheasant creek into the wind.
 
 
 
My days here pass like fields
of black loam hard with frost.
She stands before the window
and calls to the Coyote
as he gags on seeds and feathers.
Hello?  Laughing.
 
Do you see?
Do you see anything?
Do you hear the transparent
voices in the dark?
 
She calls, Do you hear the wind?
 
Winds blow between the lives we are.
They are white and very loud.
 
 
 
Spring will be a hen-pheasant
breaking the seeds in the grass.
She will do it gently.
 
At the close of the year,
seeds and fern are the only seasons
in deep valleys, at dusk.
Do you hear the rumbling?
She cries out very loud now,
Do you hear the snow coming?
 
Hello?
 
Seeds burst into the wind
from the thin pods. She laughs
and bends to smooth the grass.
             
 
Choose another sample
             
 
 
            RAIN SPILLS FROM THE PAGES
OF THE GREEN-BACKED BOOK
OF THE HUNTER
             
 
I
 
I walk through delicate, tangled trees and age
into the mountains;
I kick up brittle, rotten twigs,
beneath the cottonwoods&emdash;
and kick up bits of old cotton
soggy with rain and grey
with the dark of December.
 
First I wipe the rain from my eyes
and then I thumb
through the pages for moss.
I find rain. I dive in,
jack-knifing through the last ray of sun,
into moss. I lie there,
on that soft, steaming bed,
watching cold stars
as they swim up heavily
over the horizon
into the rippling air of winter.
 
I touch a grey, bare branch
and think  green, green leaves.
The bark warms and trembles.
 
The distant sky thunders.
Mountains crumble into summer.
Gravel sucks at my feet
and I spiral down a thin green river,
and wash up on a gravel bar
under a noise like rain.
 
 
II
 
The hunter stumbles
form summer light into rain,
pauses, wipes his face clean,
and stumbles on.
The earth-stink is the smell of years.
He knows this.
He thinks of leaves.
He's never been this close to death.
He kneels, and plunges his hand
into the soft loam
and burrows, slowly,
through the last crumbling
black veins of old leaves
and the hollow stems of twigs&emdash;
the smell of earth and age&emdash;
until he strikes gravel,
in the dark.
He opens his yes.
The rain glistens of the black
surfaces, all about him.
Even off his memory, it glistens.
 
For a long time,
the hunter listens to the world. Rain.
The locusts rattle their black beans
and their roots grind into stone. He says,
so these are the sounds the years make.
He says it loudly.
He has never been so close.
He leans back against the warm earth,
and smiles. He has come,
he has arrived. There are cities,
he knows, there are fields,
and there is rain.
 
 
III
 
A leaf drifts
and catches on the brittle
stalks of mustard dark with seeds.
I peer closer. I listen.
Somehwere I hear a tree tick,
in wind. Listen, I know so many years. Listen.
It's too late to try to read:
I walk out hurriedly, past the dark evergreen hedges
into the black field.
Gravel sucks at my feet, rumbles,
and I'm washed away into rain.
             
 
Choose another sample
             
 
 
            WORDS IN JANUARY
             
 
Dusk is the darkest time of the year.
Clouds squeeze in now
fuming with night and snow
and hasten on:
caught alone at dusk, a man
must stop himself
and wait to hear his blood
or he will be lost
in the new year.
I settle, slowly,
into a bed of old fruit and leaves
and wait for the bear
to rumble over this abandoned orchard,
his yellow eyes flashing,
lick himself, and rumble on,
his nails clattering.
 
Every year I leave on a journey
and every winter
I pause here awhile
and leave in the morning,
stiff and cursing,
into a sky of blood.
I don't know why I come.
 
Last night the bear raked the sky
into tatters of milk
and soil.
I have no answers:
I can only look up into clarity or clouds
and wonder.
Moving once and lost
I discovered these bent trees
black with age and fruit
and I come here, alone.
I don't know why I come.
I walk in the tumbling dusk
and lean against a crumbling velvet limb
in the dark of winter
because my eyes hurt
and I can hardly breathe.
But I don't know why I come.
I watch&emdash;and wait for days&emdash;
and shiver.
 
Last year I watched entire histories
move on to newer ground,
swarms of virgins running down,
their hair full of pinecones
and milk, from the mountains.
I watch the earth now.
Look how the blackbird
tears at the brown hanging skin
of an old sweet apple,
and sways, and sings&emdash;
and the last red leaf clatters
against a black limb.
Look how the stars come in,
trembling,
shaking out their hair
into streams of light.
They wind the light back in
with dark arms.
At times I have heard
them sing,
softly,
without any words at all.
 
It's hard to speak in this darkness.
It's better to walk,
your blood like wet leaves&emdash;
to walk hard
and to keep on walking 
until you hear trees above you
and you can lie down.
In the winter darkenss
after the rains at dusk
the black trees are born
in the winds and sway,
and tremble,
troubled and very old.
One can only say they thrive.
And do we thrive like that?
One can only say we do.
If I speak to you at all, remember:
my voice is coming from the darkness:
it has only one
direction,
it knows nothing
of the light.
If I carry anything,
it is the smell of rotted fruit,
of mildewed leves and clattering grass
I carry,
and that is a smell
that makes a man stay awake for a year
and shake in the wind.
             
 
Choose another sample
             
 
            OUT IN THE WORLD
             
 
First
 
The mountains,
blue, light-drenched,
slip from the world with the heat,
and ease back into it
again, knowing. The sea also
can escape us and return;
the scrub pushes up the sky
with its growing, the stars
begin here, at an oak's crown,
at my fingertips; the sea
turns in upon itself.
I do not need to prove these things.
The land is firm.
 
 
Interface
 
When the mountains return to us,
the flowing scree,
the flames of the trees,
they radiate a tender strength.
Over and over, in the summer,
I have watched them spin all about me
as I've walked. And what do you do 
with the pulpy stems
of the pigweed
crisp with rain?
Love them. It is never enough.
     All things in the world
focus down to points
of light or dark; we are always slipping
through this ether,
forever swelling, contracting,
forever inverting. Everything
focusses down to points 
of light or dark, flashes
that light up the slopes across the bay
in the afternoon, flashes lost
where ocean joins air,
or land joins.
     It is there, the interface:
the grain nodding below the brown clouds,
the stones glistening,
the roots silver,
the sea.
 
 
A Centre
 
Either the brooding gods,
the sky a salmon's eye,
or the slow unfolding mountains
into day, the nighthawk
pulling the speckled dark about
all around him. Points,
focusses or fusions of vision,
but give us something, bird,
we can cling to: never this uncertain
stance, this groping through old leaves
for an apple, a touch of bark and the hope
for a green world
to spring from that. Is it ourselves
we have to deal with?
Or is it land?
I would like to walk there.
 
 
I Raise My Hands
 
It is the tenderness of dusk wind
on bare skin, the thin unyielding push
of leaves against the hand,
the growing tip against
clouds and thought: these I can stay for:
the way the chest tightens
with tenderness, the way I slow down
and see the mountain flow, the river
cool through scorching stones
shimmering like leaves, and all of it
incomprehensible to me.
 
 
I Raise My Hands
 
And you have to give it
order, but what order?
Mountain standing
straight up out of dimension,
come to me.
I want to push
my hands through you with
the greatest tenderness.
 
 
Touch
 
When love places the valley
in one plane for us,
or the light comes down
in strands of hair or music
before the shadow
or just inside the shadow,
what can we do with the world? We love it. We can't
give it our fictions, our names;
we sit on the still banks
of the river, the stones
so deceptively solid
without deception
beneath our calloused heels, the river
pulling us I don't know where,
through our eyes, and we
sit forever.
The dimensions of the mind
also last for a time.
The cliffs glisten across the river.
Archetypes we have forgotten
yet long for still.
 
And when you have done
with dimension, time and distance,
the U-shaped valleys
of blue light and harvest wind&emdash;
when you have done with everything&emdash;
you are left with love.
None of us know love.
We must begin again
to enter the world
in every joy:
these bushes leaping out
of light, conscious, blowing
in the wind, can barely
contain their shapes.
             
Choose another sample
             
 
 
            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.
             
 
Choose another sample

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