New Poems by James Reidel
MOMENTARIALISM WITH A SMALL TOP HAT
— based on a word by Reed Ghazala
The egg timer’s pinch,
Rose sand,
An ant farm’s shower,
Ampoule to ampoule, dust to dust,
Three minutes of not trapped between floors,
The camel heaven.
You won’t need a beach of it to know,
Was it good for you?—
Just enough to pave emery boards.
They dispense like fortune sticks and I am the only
one who’s ever
Put them in my spokes,
Made the clothespin fight a finger like dinosaurs
until the spring
Squirts out like an eyeball. I am the only one ever
To see a drinking bird get his fill.
THE BOUQUET OF BALZER BOERTLEIN'S PANTS
We rethrifted them and all his cat’s cradle rigging belt loop
3 and 5 to make them meet,
The way widower’s sew, which you can tell he did blind,
Part from tying up tomatoes and beans in their leaves,
Part guess-which-hand when he gave you a quarter.
All the knots and pulls in the packing twine are quite where
quipu met Braille for this one time
To record every subtraction from his waist that once
gaped for him
Like the 30-gal. Glad bag at our feet.
We search his pockets and get rich on diamonds of pilled
foils,
The half sticks of Juicy Fruit torn like tickets to someplace
still sweet and gray.
A matchbook cover folded to a painted fan for 1,000
stamps,
Kleenex with a little blood and a canary’s funeral for a
yellow tooth.
We stuffed an enormous pillow of trousers that you
could almost hug,
Disturbing only a little its black and green smell.
JAMES REIDEL is currently working on a long piece about the novelist Theodora Keogh. His poems frequently appear in TAR.
