CHARLES P. RIES
CHARLES
P. RIES
Charles P.
Ries lives and writes in
Acknowledgments
As always, grateful
appreciation and acknowledgment is given to Joan Raveling for her constant encouragement, willingness to edit
and therapeutic interventions. I would also like to express my continuing debt
of gratitude to Albert Huffstickler who died
DEDICATION
ST. JOAN OF
Charles P. Ries
charlesr@execpc.com
Published August 2004
“GOD BLESS THE SMALL PRESS”
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Watching A River Flow
Poets Nova
You Never Left
Stars Suspended From Branches
The Moon Was January In
60 Degrees Of Separation
Once Again
Between The Times
You Got Me
Killing Season
Source Material
When Penis Walked The Earth
Seed of Greatness
Reading Octavio Paz
Return Home
Erotic Geography
Feathers For Carlos
Valentine
I Love
Points of View
What It Isn’t
Schnook
Influences Of Light
Bless Me Father For I Have Sinned
Fly Of Inspiration
Good Night
Odd
I like to disappear into my head where it
doesn’t cost much to be alone. I see a horizon
in the distance lying between the vistas
of my temples - spreading from my
left ear
to my right ear.
In here I astro project, read people’s
thoughts
and see the future. In here I bring the dead back
to life and turn my tears to snowflakes.
And while the weather is 70 degrees and sunny
in here,
it’s quite another story out there where
a suicide bomber kills for religion and we go to
war for oil. It’s all higgledy piggledy,
out there.
In sleep, my mind becomes unpredictable.
The oddest things rise up and collide. Things I
could not imagine in my day mind - tea pots
chase Sister Agnes wearing a red cocktail dress round
the altar. A bluebird whispers to me in Spanish as
we walk the rings of Saturn.
It’s a vast Cineplex between my ears. A world teeming
with perfect lovers and sleeping demons. A theater in
the round where I view my life against the movie screen
God attached to the backside of my eyeballs.
WATCHING A RIVER FLOW
The
and slow. It’s high and tight on Friday night.
Bum walks by imitating the hype
and clean...but smelling like a bar floor.
He’s listening...to something on the
D Battery he’s pressed to the side of his head.
It’s not a tune - he’s not humming.
It’s not a prophetic vision - he’s not glowing
Bag lady dances near the dumpster looking like
a helium balloon. She’s the gravitational center
of a plastic bag she wears for warmth. A planet
stuffed full of bathroom tissue and old newspapers.
She’s humming...something too.
In her mind she hears a hit parade.
Damp and 50 degrees doesn’t prevent Ms. Candy
Cane from showing off 80% of her six foot frame
with only 8% body fat. Her boyfriend looks nervous
holding this long, lanky love stick. Worried she
might float away like tissue in a soft breeze.
Bums and bunnies drift past me like minstrels in a
marching band. The river is leading me downstream.
POETS NOVA
Our thoughts are like dancers, two
inter-mingled, co-existing electrons
spinning around the same nucleus.
Our hearts, the pulsars at the center of
this rich, red, universe. Roses
clinched
between orbiting lips that circle a
black
planet obscured by an eclipsing
moon.
I wonder if wishing sets thoughts in motion,
causing invisible ripples in the
unseen?
Ripples that carry our
secrets to God?
I consider all these things from my bar stool,
the poet’s throne. A magical
chair with roots
that grows limbs and a mind of
its own.
After you died, I kept you near.
I brought you with me to parties.
I placed you in the trunk of my car,
close to my CD changer and the
music we loved - together.
I felt cheated to be left with only
memories of you. You filled so much
space. A nature so luminous it
lit the
dark river path we walked along
that
autumn before you left me - alone.
So I’ll keep you and set you on the
table during poker night, or next
to my
pillow as I sleep, or amidst the
floral
arrangement at the museum ball.
“You look lovely in brass and silver
tonight. Is your lid screwed on
tight?
Would you mind if I shake you baby,
pop your top and sprinkle you
on my
Caesar salad?”
“Just look at them looking. They’re all green
with envy. I’m with the prize.
One whose
beauty they all wish they could
posses.”
I think I will keep you with me forever.
STARS SUSPENDED FROM
BRANCHES
My grandfather often told us that on the day of his birth they put him
in the corner to die when he, the weaker of two
scrawny twins,
came into the world. “But I didn’t die. Here I am,” he
laughed.
His brother died a few days later. Funny how death
works.
Shortly after my father died, my mother announced that she would soon
be passing, and eleven months later with a slight
smile on her lips, she
released her final worry and said good-bye. Death was not in
the room.
My mother didn’t believe in death.
At middle age I stand tonight on the field where we played 10,000 soft ball
games as children. Where I called my brother the longest
litany of swear
words my ten year old mouth could spit out. I am standing
here looking at
the sky trying to remember something.
Maybe stars are the souls of the glimmering dead, or perhaps meteors
are
the tear drops of souls soon to be returned. Souls like
me who dread their
plunge back into life’s unpredictable sea.
But tonight I mainly think of my grandfather Peter. Who at 94 could laugh
about the day he chased death from his door. He didn’t
believe in death.
He died sweetly with a smile on his lips just as my mother did.
As a small boy, I sit under the Elm tree that spreads protecting arms
over
my grandparents’ cream city brick home. I watch my
grandmother as
she cleans her attic. Hurling, tossing the accumulated
treasures
of a life time out the garret window high above me.
Beneath her,
and before me, rise a pile of memories, treasure and
heartache.
“I’m cleaning up. Clearing out. Getting ready
to leave,” she says, in that
succinct way she spoke about everything important. “For what?” I
wondered,
until eight months later she died.
Someday it will be my turn to die, and when it is, I will laugh, clean
my attic,
and cast away my last worry. I will await release into
an ocean of night where
stars hang suspended from the branches of a massive Elm
tree and souls
who’ve returned home swing for eternity, shedding tears
for the living.
THE MOON WAS JANUARY IN
“Damn, damn, damn it’s cold!” I heard a guy four up from me say.
“Hey, no complaining. If the girls can take it
and so can you,”
came a muffled reply three behind me that shivered its
way
through the frigid air from beneath a parka and a ski mask.
I was in line with the
Rec-Plex to open its damn doors because we (the regulars)
were freezing our asses off.
We’re from the
the weather defines you, molds you, silences you.
As kids we’d wrap ourselves in ten layers of clothes, leaving
only our eyeballs exposed to the snow and the chill. After
30
minutes of dressing, we’d be pushed out the door like
paratroopers being dropped into enemy territory. “And
don’t come back for an hour,” we’d hear our mother’s
voice
trail off in the distance as the howling wind became the
only
audible sound. The four of us bounded out onto a great,
frozen,
wind-swept planet whose landscape we used to call our back
yard. We were Apollo 7. This was our moon walk.
At dusk, as the light grew dim and dinner time neared, we
pounded on the space shuttle door and asked permission to
enter - fearful that our hour had not yet expired. The benevolent
silhouette of our commander appeared, shrouded in a golden
light,
emanating the thousand scents from the outpost kitchen. She
permitted us to enter the lunar capsule, warm protection from a
frozen planet.
60 DEGREES OF SEPARATION
When winter gives way to 60 degrees
we pause and wait for temperate betrayal.
Not trusting spring or her herald,
a winged red-breasted messenger. After all,
she might just be winter in sheep’s clothing.
But our blood knows, and our hearts know,
and the sap that has settled in our feet know
as it gradually rises to a groin, which has
grown as cold as January.
We sense the nuance of spring arriving.
The sun bends our winter shadows shorter
until a solar equinox sends them into hibernation.
Shadows disappearing into summer vacation.
But today I feel a tingle between my legs.
I expand with release, and the resurrection
of loves promise. I am born again in
spring, when snow is sent running under
ground, and we are liberated from our
long pants.
ONCE AGAIN
Once I was a blade of grass and the breeze passed
above me and rubbed against me, bending me. “Such
freedom,” I thought. “To be a breeze. To soar high above
and close to the ground, to be rootless in air.”
Once I was a crow and I fought for the food I could find.
I sat in a great Oak Tree and surveyed the fields that
stretched around me in all directions. Fields like pastured
banquet tables that fed what I fought for or found. “Oh, to
be an Oak Tree, sucking sustenance effortlessly through
a matrix of soda straws spread
invisibly beneath the earth.”
Once I was a human, I had complex thoughts and confusions.
I yearned for wealth and love and power and good looks.
All this yearning tired me and gave me migraine headaches.
Headaches so vast and out of control they robbed my sleep
and made me vomit. And as I lay on my couch, half in,
half out of awareness, from the sleeping pills and pain
killers,
I remembered myself as a blade of grass turning my side to
the sun and my tongue to the rain and my roots to
and I ached to be simply green again.
BETWEEN the TIMES
When one thing
ends and before
the next begins.
It is best to
fill this time,
a bridge
that arches
over the end
and toward a
beginning,
with silence.
If we walk
patiently
wakefully
eyes wide
ears poised
tongue still
during this
silent time,
even a leaf
descending
downward
will shout
words of
wisdom.
YOU GOT ME
I don’t understand it all
the days as they change -
the rise and the fall of joy.
I don’t understand the
jerks and the drunks,
the long conversations
about, “what’s it all about?”
I don’t understand why
I feel rescued in your arms
yet want to flee - later to return.
I don’t understand how we
drop out of the womb, exactly
the way we will be - already
quick, slow witted or restless.
But as this beer lightens my thoughts
I see a mysterious order to a universe
that I just don’t understand.
KILLING SEASON
I did what I had to do. I had no choice. I was the son of the man
who raised them. From kittens in May
to an early death in November.
Our mink dressed the fashion elite. We cared for our animals like
they were our furred children.
We gave them a good short life and a quick painless death. We’d drop
them like quarters into a wooden box containing cyanide
powder and
wait a few minutes until they expired, slowly, silently,
into eternal sleep.
We didn’t always kill them that way. We used to break their necks.
But it took a big man many hours to break 10,000 necks each pelting
season. So we changed with the times and went with
cyanide.
This allowed me, at fourteen, to become the chief executioner.
I wasn’t thoughtless. It never became like breathing or picking corn.
I’d run wheel barrows full in to my father who peeled their skin off
and
readied them for
My prolific ability at killing 40,000 mink over four seasons left me
hanging
when I filed for Conscientious
Objector status with my draft board. They
asked me, “If you had no qualms about killing thousands
of mink, how come
you have a moral problem with killing the enemies of
your country? I mean,
killing is killing, ain’t it son? Aren’t you just a natural
born killer?”
The purity of their logic confused me. I had always been an absolutist,
like
those Jain monks who see God in an ant. Who, when
inadvertently stepping
on a beetle see a sentient being crushed to death.
If I could kill mink, why not men?
SOURCE MATERIAL
It just hits you between the ears. The lady kissing
her poodle.
The young man crying alone at the airport. The big breasted
blonde in skin tight lycra pants
and three inch heels carrying
white angel wings.
I’m on alert for these moments out of time. Moments
of chartreuse against black velvet.
Catching the early flight to LA, I stop in the men’s room
to wash the morning news ink off my fingers when I see
yet another chartreuse moment. An overweight,
gray-haired guy
in a faded wool plaid jacket, wearing one of those
winter hats with
flaps, taking a crap while parked like a monk in
meditation.
I stop and stare, viewing him through a wide open handicapped
stall, head down, pants dropped to the ground, deep in
concentration. The world passing him by does not exist,
for he is
securely reposed. He is one - with something.
I take a mezzanine seat at the sink directly across from this wonder,
“This guy doesn’t mind sharing his private moments,” I think. “Maybe
he has an open door policy?” He’s no exhibitionist,
lurking through
the airport in a raincoat. He’s just going about his
business as a free
citizen of the
He buckles up and flushes his masterpiece down the poop shoot.
30,000 feet above
A chartreuse moment?
WHEN PENIS WALKED THE EARTH
(
I never thought of it as evolving. At least not like this.
Never thought about when it first raised it’s
proud little head.
But a 425-million year old fossil found in
changed all that. The oldest record of an animal that was
unarguably
male made me stop and take stock. A tiny crustacean,
only
two-tenths of an inch long - with an unmistakable penis.
They christened it Colymbosathon Ecplecticos which means
“swimmer with a large penis.”
Scientists say it had copulatory organs
one-third the length of
its body. Wow. Makes a guy sit back and think about all
the
evolutionary outcomes. The cars we’d drive or the clothes
we’d
wear.
Monkeys became men.
Fish learned to fly.
Penises roamed prehistoric earth.
I guess some things never change.
SEED OF GREATNESS
(
Some thought of him as a throw back to the Cretaceous
Period. A yellow belly bottom dweller who in the midst
of spring’s spawning season could leap like a
porpoise.
We tagged him in
him Mike. He swam down the
and locks and into the
what Christopher Columbus was to
astronaut, citizen philosopher who followed his own stream.
Washing up on
ignominiously found dead on arrival in the grip of a
commercial fishing net. Wisconsin/Ohio wildlife authorities
concluded his death was the result of spawning stress at
100 years of age. He had wandered nearly 400 miles as the
crow flies from a lake his species was never known to
leave.
God bless fish like Mike, or men like Mike, or reptiles
like Mike. For out of the million aberrant matings and
progeny they produce, a few mutant seeds grow wilder
than the rest. Seeds that carry the promise of leading a
flock, a school, or a human race out of their pond and
into a vast uncharted sea.
READING OCTAVIO PAZ
(Early Poems 1935-1955)
Mexican poets often leap from sidewalk
to roof top. One foot on the earth and
the other on a cloud of cotton candy.
They gaze at death and see dancing skulls
with smiles stretching as far and wide as
the Milky Way.
I close my eyes and see within myself a naked boy
sitting beneath a vast pecan tree. From its branches
hang stars. This canopy of shade becomes my
universe.
Carlos blows into Olivia’s ear a love whisper,
sending a waterfall of kisses cascading out her
mouth onto brown soil where white flowers erupt.
A prisoner of my imagination, I turn to face myself
and shout, “who’s there?” The Mexican poets have
impregnated my fiction with new possibilities.
RETURN HOME
I took a vacation and traveled to the furthest place
I could find. A place lacking the familiar landmarks
and faces.
I spent the first year walking slowly around
the
rings of Saturn chanting Eileen.
I spent the second year in nine cathedrals waiting
for
a message from God.
I spent the third year in bed with Rosa Marie
who chattered Aztec
secrets in my right ear
and
sent monarch butterflies out my left.
And then I returned home to familiar faces, family
and friends and thanked them all for being so
steadfast.
EROTIC GEOGRAPHY
Reclining after sex, I turn toward the south as day’s final light
floods in over the hips and breasts of my
hair, red lips and brown eyes. She satiates me into
silence and
I willingly dissolve into her olive colored thighs. A full woman
whose face glistens like polished copper in morning
light.
A soft still snow falls around us and, but for her lips, we would
be invisible in a cloud of white. Dry gullies, morning
mists and
dusty streets speak to us in the soft whispers of old
lovers, who
communicate more with raised eyebrows than young lovers
do
in breathless paragraphs.
An image of Our Lady of Perpetual Tears appears on the pavement
before us in an oil stain looking curiously like Our Lady
of Guadeloupe.
I kneel down before it and kiss my virgin queen in her guise of street
black stain.
Mariachis in silver studded, skin tight black pants sing us a hymn and
then a lover’s ballad for five pesos. Angels whisper to
us in Spanish
as
sweet water from her full ample breasts.
FEATHERS FOR CARLOS
I went to my first singles mixer last tonight. Or rather,
I entered the room that overlooked the patio, where
singles fluttered about like feathers from one shoulder
to the other.
It was a snow storm of feathers, rising, falling, landing,
leaning, seeking a soft safe place to rest. As I looked
out over that patio of desires, where hearts emit
silent but
detectable love calls, I felt myself reconsider whether
I want to join this sea of seekers. Maybe my heart is
whole and not in need of one-true-love or her expectant
arms of warm salt water.
Arms in which to float and wander; bobbing gently -
up and down, and, up and down - as I gaze into
an August sky on a day so humid the rain falls like
mist sprayed from a gigantic squirt bottle held in the
invisible hand of a water god.
I considered all this as I stood there looking, wondering
whether I should step into that yearning river. And I
turned
and decided to go home.
It was just cowardice on my part. I told myself, I’ll perfect
my “oh-sweet-baby” come on line and return at another
time
to seek out the most listless of these feathers. I’ll
then hold
her in my finger tips and ask her to marry me, and
we’ll live
happily ever after in the pink hallow of my soft warm
hands.
VALENTINE
They’re complex
these things we
build our hearts around.
These things we construct
out of lovers leaps.
Communicated in the
silent language of -
how
two bodies fit together
a
familiar smile
a
scent of remembering
Souls recognizing reunion.
These are the mysteries of love.
A cat bugler creeps
between two strange hearts
and finds only their yearning.
And looking into their
underwear drawer discovers
their lust. And in smelling the
insoles of their journey together
the miles they’ve walked.
And through seasons and
doubts and changes of fashion
they discover their relationship,
unearthing a heart painted in a
bold brush stoke and the message,
it has been better to love.
I LOVE
Your grilled cheese sandwiches under
the full March moon, as Jupiter draws
near and we witness its unblinking eye
hovering above the horizon at early dusk.
The way your lip is slightly twisted upward
at one corner making your mouth look like
an irregular right triangle.
Your explanation for washing your bed
sheets three times a week, “dust mites.”
Your mantric complaint about how hard it is
to dress well at 20 below zero in the midst of
a blizzard. Yet refusing to compromise for
the sake of warmth instead sludging,
steadfast,
like an Armani foot soldier through road salt,
snow drifts and sleet. Saying, “some things
will not be compromised!”
Your method of slowly moving, methodically
passing through the house...dusting, resetting
souvenirs, just so. You, the feng shui master
of knickknacks and fashion magazines, creating
a perfect order in the universe of our life.
POINTS OF VIEW
You asked for the truth.
And I told you, “I think I love you.”
You were looking for
a different kind of truth.
And that’s where we get
tangled up.
Disagreeing
about gradations.
You
certain.
You wanting.
Me
avoiding.
Often
misplacing.
And the hunter asks the
meditating
monk, “Did you see a deer pass
this way?”
And the monk replies, “Yes,”
and sends
the hunter off in the wrong
direction.
A greater
good lie.
Truth is a murky pond
A beacon for the mystic
And bacon
for the liar.
WHAT IT ISN’T
I used to think love was
the electrical charge that
passed
between the groins of strangers
searching for perfect union.
Later I thought love, mature
love,
was recognizing the abundance
of space that circled one
certain
someone. And drowning in this
tranquil pond of silence and rest.
Still later, after my first
divorce,
I lowered my expectations,
as
experience and life tends to make
us do, and felt friendship was
love’s
seed. If nurtured, it ignites
into
passionate flames – maybe.
After my second divorce, I
wondered if it was only the brief
predictable space between two lips,
two half opened eye lids. Just
before
day disrupts the clarity of the
groggy.
Now I realize how illusory
and without definition love is.
Transparent, weightless, out
of time, unattainable. A sun
that rises only to burn hope
from hearts exhausted in
the act of anticipation.
SCHNOOK
I should have ended it two years ago.
But I am a lazy lover.
Lover of predicable routine.
Thinking it might grow into fat
happy romance.
You wanted to live together.
I wanted one night a week.
You wanted me to be present
and bend to your needs.
I wanted to remain true to my
lazy nature.
I guess that makes me opportunistic.
The kind of guy women talk about
when they recite the ways in which a
dog is better then a boyfriend or
the many uses for the pickle they keep
in their refrigerator.
Sometimes I think only another man
can see what divinity doth lurk in
the heart of a schnook.
But still I should have known.
I should have ended this fantasy
that you and I would live happily
ever after - sooner.
Kiss a frog
get a prince in pond water.
INFLUENCES OF LIGHT
It happens each early
summer.
She backs off her
anti-depressants,
thinking more UV rays can substitute
for her drugs. She comes out
swinging,
determined to reclaim what is
rightfully hers.
For a day or a week she’s a
warrior,
but quickly fades into a
humble,
tumble, pile of bewilderment.
(It’s
hard to sustain determination on
just sunlight. Warmth alone
isn’t
enough to help you think
straight.)
Following her short freedom
flight,
she becomes earth bound, a
cloud
that hovers low against a county
trunk
road - a vaporous curtain that
flattens
and abducts you.
But you drive on, and
eventually pass
through it, through her. And bring
her to
a small hill where you ask
her to look
a great distance and remember
tomorrow
or yesterday or her true
nature with the ease
of her winter fresh mind.
BLESS ME FATHER FOR I HAVE
SINNED
I was restless with
the weight of
ideas
that flooded me and awaited
their
release in the red rain of my
journal.
I stacked five stones
on a farmer’s
fence
post to create a monument to
my
existence that only cows and
plow
jockeys would see.
I flung myself off a
quarry ledge
high
above a deep blue pool and
imagined
it was a concrete street,
wishing
for the end.
I drove my Ford pick
up over a Gila
monster
that peeled its pancaked
corpse
off
after
me spitting curses in Spanish.
I dropped acid and
thought a thin
curtain
separated me from a world
that
glittered with diamonds, and
angels,
and joy, and that my manual
Smith Corona type
writer was an
oracle
who revealed ancient truths
with
the touches of my finger tips.
For all this Father, I ask you forgive me.
FLY OF INSPIRATION
Sometimes when I sit down
to write I place my fingers
just above the key board and
let my mind expand beyond
the confines of my head.
It’s a little relaxation
technique
I do. I fill the whole house
with
my mind and invite those
‘things’
floating in the unseen
to come visit. As I do this I
can feel myself get a bit light
headed. Then I remain still and
wait. Like a frog on a lily pad
scanning the sky for a fly to eat.
And I wait.
Sooner or later, I see or
feel
something as it comes in for a
landing. I let it rest on my tongue
as I try to figure out what it
tastes
like and feels like, and what it
might
become if I spend time with it.
Usually it will tell me
something
about itself, but more often than
not it remains a mystery until
I
follow it with my fingers.
GOOD NIGHT
With the weightless hand of night.
With today having no face or memory.
I slip into my feathered honey pot.
Casting lots with the guard of my imagination
and win, rolling nine straight sevens.
The stars must be perfectly aligned for such luck.
I fold today into white cotton linens,
and close my eyes,
tumbling away to islands that float in the
glorious mist of sleep.
ODD
They can’t hear it.
They don’t listen to leaves
in the moon light. The mystical
whisper of branches rubbing.
Funny what happens to a life
when trees start talking to you.
When you hear the voices of your
garden.