STUMP CROWNED WITH SNOW
With the same ball-and-claw roots,
With the instep of an umbrella stand,
The copper beech still has canopy rights,
That invisible, barely legal cone where a subtle blush
shade
Would have settled through its purple leaves,
Which in April felt soft and lined like
the palms of
a baby,
Settled under the wheel of its lowest limbs
Where children picked their favorites to climb and
rock like horses.
Grackles still come every third week in October to
see if it is really gone.
The worry they could mutter during their feast,
which made the star husks rain,
Seemed to all point in that direction
Suddenly taking the winter wind’s now,
Giving it a leg to stand on
If just for a moment’s waltz on a drumhead of snow.
FOR My Great Aunt, ANNA LOUISE
6 March 1892 – 17 November 1898
All that still stood beautiful
Were the thin soles of her button shoes,
The same cut and scuff brown of the beech leaves
blowing across the yard
As the world refilled the blast cone, the birdshot,
The spot where she stood.
Leaves filled the crooks of her arms and legs
Tossed like her chipped doll,
Some not knowing what to do and off again,
Some gathering to keep her warm as though a larger
force were at work
Than the God of Accidents
Counting Reidels on his fingers,
Skipping the eldest sister’s bastard
Because he didn’t make a real thirteen,
Landing on “Lulu,”
The last girl after a run of boys,
Like meat tossed in their games,
Listen, listen, the cat’s a pissin’, run get the gun, before she’s
gone and done …
How do I know it was like this?
I didn’t get her brother’s eyes.
He didn’t have killer hair.
I’m the kind we always call “his mother’s people.”
The brow, maybe—
You’d get lost up there getting anything out of
your head.
So how do I?
There must be a gene for it like the one for
depression,
Something wrong you can’t see,
Like the one for moonless nails.
THE BEECH CLOCK
The still-life of the great crack and crash lies like a
tossed bouquet.
I press my palm to the smooth gray bark,
For that balance of a grownup’s leg.
The tree must have soared too close to the gully that
fed the creek below.
I pat the long trunk with the comfort I might have
given a dead whale had I found one.
Slowly the American beech is this enormous rail up
to where the lovers carved their initials,
To where the Gulf trumped winter,
A pilgrim’s path, a flume of rain and leaves to the
root ball
Torn from ground thawed to a wet cement shoe,
where I stand dime-sized,
The Mayan guide with his big hand on sidereal mud
Ratted with the curling and clotting of too many
snakes, jaguar tails, and tongues,
Of all the moons, moving goal posts.
Bio:
James Reidel has published poems since the early 1980s in such venues as Paris Review and the New Yorker. His first collection of poems, however, My Window Seat for Arlena Twigg and Other Poems, was not published until 2006 by Black Lawrence Press. In 2007 he won one of the three PEN translation awards for Under the Iron of the Moon/In Hora Mortis by Thomas Bernhard (Princeton University Press, 2006). An editor, he has assembled a collection of stories by Alvin Levin, Love is Like Park Avenue (New Directions, 2010), with a foreword by John Ashbery. He is currently working on a long article about the novels and life of Theodora Keogh.
