Reger, Will

Will Reger

Summer Wreckage

Light says nothing in passing.
It cannot last, cannot endure.

Light burns when it is purest,
when it escapes the spectacle.

Light can never last or hold fast.
When beauty least expects it,

light opens a door and escapes,
and after light, life goes out.

Beauty never plans for that.
Life leaves behind its ruin: death.

When light departs, life is taken
and happiness fails as well.

Light leaves both stars and lilies.
Both linger for a moment,

then go, like happiness,
into the twilight, the cold winter.

For just a moment light fills us,
burning purely, the summer in us,

but then comes evening, winter.
Light passes from us so silently.

Elegy for Toothless, Beloved Rabbit

A rabbit has no song,
except the quiver of her nose,
or the easy way of her soft coat,
loose over muscle and bone,
or the rhythm of her nibbling
from hand or bowl, or of anything
she finds on the floor:
the cereal spilled,
the Timothy hay strewn,
the strawberry tops
dropped intentionally
where she can find them.
She says her bit with scut and speed,

with running in circles, chasing
her rabbit friends, lolloping
on carpet or grass, leading
the way into hijinx.
What was best in us we saw in her.

Her eyes were pools of ink
with which she wrote the moon
when it shone into her kitchen corner,
and the sun sparkling on rain-wet grass.
Everything was hers to sing:

the light, the grass, the love
she shared with her humans,
the many sounds that reached
her lissome ears. Free of fear
of any foxes, she dozed
with perfect dignity, soft
as a shadow she slept,
soft as a shadow she passed.

The Neighbor Lady

Lady neighbor
mows her lawn
in nothing but a housecoat.

Purple and paisley,
it flutters around
her ivory thighs.

Back and forth she goes
in knife-sharp lines--
she is a trooper.

But no one cheers
when that flag rises
above her march.

What must the sparrows
think, leaving
off their chatter?

Her knees, like old lovers
kiss the air,
keep to themselves.

Winter Night

The winter sky slumps
against the snow-sheeted fields
like a woman euthanized,
as the light flails
against the opaque scrim of fog
that abeys its illumination,
and swallows the white-pill stars
scattered everywhere.

Rumbling in the west,
Kevorkian takes his leave in the hall
with a last condolence,
as her cells wink out one by one
in tiny flashes that drift
down, down,
but then a wind kicks up,
as if someone threw
open a window to cut
the scent of panic
in the night.

Fender Bender

This is just to say
I hit your crow today
with the fender of my car.
I know it's your crow.
I've seen you talking to it
in the park and I was there
that day you coaxed it
with bacon onto your shoulder.

I didn't kill it, so you know,
but it fluttered and spun
like a top in the street,
a momentary storm
of coal black liquid
outrage with a fire-gold eye
staring at me in the sun,
through the sun,
as the sun.
It burned me
metaphorically and...

then, the taxi, well...

This is just to say
I have your crow
in my ice box...if you like,
I'll pay to have him
stuffed.

Will Reger's profile

Death is My Tailor

Death has fitted a suit
in my size and favorite color.
He brings it wherever he goes,
and in those crazy moments
when my chest begins to tighten,
or my automobile careens,
or a fever sits like a whore
on my brow, Death slips in
and has me try it on.

Just to make his minute
alterations, in the event
I will need something smart
to put on for when I go
with him to the station.
Because he knows I won't
be caught dead in what I die in.

I watch him working--pins
between his lips, he hums
to himself, drawing out
the black threads of danger,
disease and despair, his hand
white like a bird, fluttering off
as it rises with a flourish,
the needle--a fish in the beak of
his fingers.

He mentioned once,
as he adjusted the crotch
of the second pair of pants,
how much better it is
for all concerned that we,
quoting the poet now:
die more lightly than live,
and how better to do that
than to put on something equal
to the occasion of our passage?

Spaghetti Stain

Thumbing through One Hundred
Best Poems, I came upon lines
from the poet Kunitz--

powerful words about the moment
he waits for the mailman to bring his draft
card, from which he takes us

back through all
the generations of his ancestors--

But what catches my eye
is the wide spaghetti stain
in the margin with a tiny scrim of tomato

skin caught in the smear, rubbed in
by the big left thumb of the reader.

Was he so caught up in the poem,
so passion-smeared,
olive oil on his lips,

that he laid aside his fork
to grip the page inscribed
with the poet’s seminal moment?

Did the poem channel his own despair?
His own loss? Was this smear of red

a metaphorical bloodletting,
a grander vision that the poem pointed to,

or was it some thoughtless passing,
like a mailman who has nothing
for the hushed address so passes on?

Scrap Metal

She keeps a mountain of iron inside her,
scraps of life she bends to form
the words she bolts together into
lines so real, hard like the iron
in her spine, her blood, her mouth.
The iron is in her poetry:
an iron sky, iron muscle
sharpened into iron knives.
But a glass of red, some Mexican tunes
will awaken in her a melancholy
purpose, and she becomes not woman
or sweater girl, but Mother-Poet,
heiress to the Golden Cane,
pugilistic sister, vision
of the laundry room, rising
on wings that lift her as she sings,
Por que no quiere a Dios?
Como cuando el hierro llora
sangra rojo, sangra rojo.
Soy un herrero mejor que Dios.*

*Why do you not want God?
Like when the iron cries
bleeds red, bleeds red.
I'm a better blacksmith than God.

An Old Shirt

An old blue shirt I have:
frayed collar, color faded
from midnight deep to Prussian tired;
here a greasy residue
where gravy fell; here
a tiny rip torn by
a nail; the button threads
beginning to fail, so I don't bother
unbuttoning--just pull it
down over my unpoetic gut.

It used to be a shirt for showing up,
but now it's best for staying away.
A shirt for undoing one's
particular demons, for
slouching over poetry or doing
the dishes. A kind of armor I wear
against attacks of hubris; now the light
of poetry glimmers upon it,
making it more than it is.

Before long she will tear it
into rags for dusting or washing the car,
or square it into blocks for a quilt,
or maybe it will shroud
the one unlucky cat
for its sepulcher.

Tanka

old poems in a box
became a mouse privy
so many words
I threw them all away
their purpose has been served