Thomas Reiter's most recent book of poems, Catchment, was published in 2009 by LSU Press. He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize
as well as fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
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SHELTER
Here’s a granite boulder and its collar
of current, itself like stone.
I’m walking a frozen stream for no reason
except it’s a path I’ve never followed.
Near sunset the stream opens
onto a pond. I climb the bank, discover
a well-curb and then the ruins of
a house, uprights and ridgepoles
that must have burned years ago,
they’re so deep in sumac and pokeweed,
but still leave char on fingertips.
A single outbuilding remains: I pivot
the shed door’s wooden block, prop
that planking with its reinforcing Z
open for the last of the light.
Casting rods stand in a sheaf, their reels
darkened by rust because a wall’s
tongue-and-groove has failed, their lines
slack among the egg sacs of orb-weavers.
And here’s a bath tub filled with loam
and no one to work the worm farm.
Above it hangs a black and white photo
of a man holding a pickerel
in both hands, extended like an offering.
Ah, I think of the dream that woke me
the other night: I’d returned to the house
where I lived as a child, found its roof fallen
and the parlor filled with briars.
In the root cellar, my father’s workbench
where I loved to watch him hold
edges to his emery wheel,
sowing sparks in the dirt floor.
The motor was still running, as though
he’d been called away for a moment.
The door fastened again, I’m standing
on the stone threshold. Is that a flower
blooming beside the slab? Closer, I find
a burrow. Field mice. Crystal by crystal
their breath blossoming as hoarfrost,
a nest of cirrus-colored petals
on last year’s knotweed at the entrance.
It’s February sending word ahead.
JUST NOW
Flying ants emerge from turrets
in the lawn, pooling and flowing
among the fallen leaves,
then rise to crystallize
this October light in which a child
has come home from a class trip.
At the natural history museum she saw
a spider preserved in pitch pine,
so now she tightropes an attic joist
to where she knows the grain stress
of rooftree and rafters lets fall
beads of resin. Flying ants
mate and die in this light in which
leaves career across the schoolyard
to gather in a chain-link corner.
After an overnight rain they float
above a lion chalked on asphalt,
most of its throat and mane
suspended in solution. Centering
this moment of lion and leaves,
a child on an empty milk carton is asking,
Have you seen me?
CROSS HERE
Placed like an ellipsis mark in the shallow
current upstream of a pool, striding stones
reach a floating mat of watercress
on the other side: nasturtium, “twisted nose”
for its peppery bitterness as a garnish.
The creek’s gathering ground is woodland
and limestone hills. The leaf buds of maples
encased overnight in ice last April,
didn’t we see them in early light refract
the color of their own leaves when,
fallen, they float by this crossing
to be spirited away to the bottom?
The nesting holes of bank swallows empty
and refill. Pushing against a perch
we balance together on, mid-way across,
the stream flexes like a lens and magnifies
an empty larva case of twigs and sand
fastened to the stone’s base. Ahead,
watercress, those succulents whose leaflets
it takes a whole watershed to fill.
WATER WHEEL
(Bull City, Kansas, 1886)
To Nathan Hood the Solomon River
said Stay. Twenty years ago. Now,
the Solomon in flood, he’s watched
his mill-race overflow, the great wheel
lift off its cradle. So he’s loading his ox cart:
the circular blade half his height,
a sledge to pound out warpage, files
and whetstone, plus every belt and pulley.
Later, he’ll search downriver for where
the wheel fetches up and haul it back.
The rain returns him to Gettysburg,
July 4, the Army of Northern Virginia
in retreat. His duty to catalogue
Federals and Confederates alike
where they fell, while the graves detail
followed. Regiment, rank, name
though sometimes simply Unknown.
Minie balls flattened and tumbled
through arteries, nerves, bones,
leaving a hundred dead along a rock wall
at the Wheatfield, some already scavenged
by animals. He saw rain wash away
the markers, take the temporary earth itself.
This war is God’s will, the chaplain answered.
Nathan Hood decided he could understand
nothing beyond the work of his own will,
his own hands. Settlers when he built this sawmill
lived in dugouts or sod houses,
their kids plucking bait from ceilings.
But he made the prairie cottonwoods
come out a whole town. Even a dance hall—
melodeon, violin, accordion
and Nathan Hood calling out the steps
for high-button shoes and tallowed boots.
What dance steps would I call today?
he wonders, seeing floorboards in the current.
And Dunkards would go by as well if they stepped
into the river singing about the temple’s
veil rent asunder and marble columns
breaking, who every Sunday, their baptisms
triple immersions for the Trinity, competed
with green logs going into the teeth.
A church bulletin’s within reach, then gone.
Here comes Bull City Dry Goods,
cleaned out by a cottonwood’s hundred-foot arrow
thick as a barrel—suits and dresses,
drapery and haberdashery the river now has.
And the mayor, founder and proprietor, on foot.
Stopping beside the cart, he grips his lapels
as for a stump speech: “I have been cursed
by misfortune, and all because I would
civilize this country.” The millwright turns away,
leading his ox toward higher ground.
“God has abandoned us,” the mayor cries out.
Nathan Hood calls back, “We still have trees.”