By James Reidel

The Redaction
after Cavafy

The tetrarch paused and raised both hands so that his entourage had to a stop behind him, all save twin sisters who still carried his long towel like a train, for they had been blinded at birth so as to knead white skin like fresh dough without casting those smiles from the south. One stumbled against his arm and her bare breast brush his elbow. Then all stood still. Only the court eunuch motioned, an entreaty to prompt the next aphorism, which his master wanted for his histories, in a meter suited for demotic sensibilities. Before him ran the long mosaic, which meandered from the baths to the castle. His various cities along the river, their names in Greek, each represented by one or two of their
famous buildings, the, great lighthouse with its flame lit by tiny yellow stones, the dome of the library that resembled a goat’s teat. Then the tetrarch pointed to the river, whose brown waters glistened in depiction, set in lapis, unlike itself even under the bluest skies. But it was impossible for the eunuch to follow his master’s gaze, biting a stylus, hurriedly smearing a wax tablet with both thumbs, from AN EMPIRE ONLY EXTENDS AS FAR AS ITS WORMS to THERE PALESTINA/THERE GOD FIGHTS
HIS COCKS.

By James Reidel

During the last few days of September into the first and into the second week of October, in temperate zones, the “Indian Summer” prevails and evades any conscious effort not to speak its name. But this “sleight of season” is one we all come back to. It has fond memories. It comes with no merchandise, no uniforms, no bare knees of a cheerleader on the sidelines in her tight buckskin skirt who bared her ample breasts with that lascivious little puppet of folding the cardstock label — but there is the noble, the savage clue to its name, a coinage of the Enlightenment. You can walk about comfortably bare–chested in the weather, stark naked, and relish the unseasonable weather. Now the air does have a certain smack, a mildly astringent smell, that of fresh tar brushed on with push brooms over the better maintained driveways in the neighborhood. These lend this appearance — a great serpent with motley plumage, a thing making its way to (or from) the house, depending on the two points of view that we take in these times, whenever the wind picks up the falling leaves. Like golden scales, they drift and barrel and not a few adhere to the blacktop as it cures, making a shining path barred by spent plastic buckets, turned upside down, five–gallon bollards so as not to step, for where to stand circumspect
before all this black overpainting, seemingly hacked apart by a garden hoe, in single strokes or scattered in great letter Js, masterpiece and signature in one, wriggling in their death throes.

By James Reidel

An ice pane on the creek,
Still thin and brittle,

With the bubbled,
Imperfect jewels and spines of trapped air,

Frozen ripples —
This prescription glazing a pool

For reading the drowned leaves,
Potsherds of broken shale,

Darting minnows that live like your eyes,
Cold and wet.

By James Reidel

October: bat wings,

which hung from the window latches crinkle–cut by pinking
shears.

Black French fries.

November: turkey feathers, their peacock hues owing to a
mutation,

a source of radiation.

The Wonderful World of Color.

December: paper doll snowflakes,

which stretched and sagged where a piece of tape gave way.

By now the glass felt colder. But that didn’t hurt.

The creases — almost scorched smooth when your mother
ironed them out.

You had to tell her something, for why you were crying in–
consolably.