Sueños

Sueños

by James Reiss

In my dreams I always speak Spanish.

The cemetery may be in Brooklyn,

and I may be kneeling on a rise

looking out at the skyline of the city,

but I will whisper, Mira el sol.

And it is true the late morning

sun will turn that bank of skyscrapers

the color of bleached bone in Sonora,

and all the window washers of Manhattan

will white-out like a TV screen

in Venezuela turning to snow.

But the gray face on the headstone photograph

has a nose like my father’s,

and his voice had the lilt of the ghettos

of central Europe.

So I should kneel lower and say something

in Yiddish about fathers, grandfathers,

the hacked limbs of a family tree

that reaches as high as Manhattan.

I should say, Grampa, I loved those times

we ran through the underpasses in Central

Park, you with your cane, I with my ice

cream cones, shouting for echoes,

bursting out into sunlight—

if I only knew the language to say it in.

~ first published in The New Yorker

A DAY IN OHIO

artwork: ralph murre

A DAY IN OHIO

by James Reiss

The painters began work on the house,

wielding their brushes like wings.

By noon they took off their caps

and blotted their brows with tan rags,

then lit cigarettes by striking wooden

matches on their boots in long slow arcs.

The roof took on the color of the sun

as it broke yolk-like on the weather vane.

They did not see it splatter.

Bronze in their five-o’clock shadows,

they slapped one last gold stroke

and lowered their scaffold and stretched.

    ~ first published in Esquire

My Daughters in New York

artwork: ralph murre

My Daughters in New York       

by James Reiss                                  

What streets, what taxis transport them

over bridges & speed bumps—my daughters swift

in pursuit of union? What suitors amuse them, what mazes

of avenues tilt & confuse them as pleasure, that pinball,

goes bouncing off light posts & lands in a pothole,

only to pop up & roll in the gutter? What footloose new

freedoms allow them to plow through all stop signs,

careening at corners, hell-bent for the road to blaze straight?

It’s 10 P.M. in the boonies. My children, I’m thinking

you’re thinking your children are waiting

for you to conceive them while you’re in a snarl

with my sons-in-law-to-be who want also to be

amazing explorers beguiled by these reckless night rides

that may God willing give way to ten thousand good mornings!

~ first published in The Atlantic Monthly

and subsequently in the Pulitzer-nominated

Ten Thousand Good Mornings (Carnegie Mellon University Press)

Crystal

artwork: ralph murre

Crystal

by James Reiss

A man wets his forefinger with his tongue and holds

up a perfect water glass, empty and glistening.

He is sitting at a table in a large

hall with other men in identical blue

blazers with eagle medallions over their breast pockets.

Now the first man fingers the glass

rim, tentatively, as if it were jagged-edged.

And now he strokes it clockwise, slowly, stopping

to wet his finger again and again, like an old

man paging through a book—until the glass

comes to life with a thin, high whine like nothing

he has ever heard, and the others look up in amazement, catching

on, holding up their glasses, too, wetting and stroking

them clockwise like ice skaters in unison.

All the glasses are coming to life now; their throats are

slowly catching fire, glistening with a thinner,

higher whine than any bird. It is like a pitch

pipe with wings. It is something like the music each

man heard when he stepped outside at night

for the first time alone as a boy. Then

there was nothing in the sky but stars and music.

And the sky was like glass.

~ first published in The New Yorker