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Eclipse the Dark
My Fiftieth Birthday: July 11, 1991

                                     (for my mother)
         1

         The highway pocked with potholes crossed
         a sun-beaten plateau, past goats
         herded by boys with slingshots,
         and men with machetes strapped to their backs
         riding burros on the berm.
 
         If that was the royal road from Zacatecas,
         I was king for the day, Señor Reyes
         in Ray-Bans, singing“Las Mañanitas ”
         to myself as I jounced
         through towns in my rented car.

         I had skimmed through four generations
         by noon, recalling my maternal great-grandpa
         Obadiah had outridden stop signs
         and lived to be a hundred and two.
         Now the one-o’clock sky loured;

         clouds deepened, amber to umber; shadows
         showered mesquite, Joshua trees,
         till a false twilight stalled
         over a dog baring fangs, stretched
         dead in the opposite lane,

         and I caught myself in the rearview mirror,
         squinting at the penumbral
         haze beyond my headlights:
         green in the dashboard’s glow,
         I was halfway home.

         2

         That black plateau under a skyful of stars,
         when I parked, looked like the floor
         of a crater greater than I’d ever seen--
         as if I could crawl up its walls
         to the Milky Way’s rim
        
         and study every wrinkle
         and river in the Earth’s dark caldera.
         From a Pemex truck stop I craned
         for a glimpse of the total eclipse’s
         frost-white corona, with prominences,

         quarter-million-mile-high
         mega-headed fire storms
         against a midnight backdrop. The middle age
         of a less-than-average superstar
         had a dowdy glamor.

         In umbral shade I knew
         The Woman in the Moon, with a chiseled
         profile, whom the Orientals
         noticed aeons ago,
         was no vestal señorita.

         I knew that she and the sun in missionary position
         rode the zodiac’s pale divan
         in fullness once a month, conceiving tides,
         the moods of politicians, lunatics
         in love with power and light.

         3

         Moon-shadowed, I wanted to do a hat
         dance with Cassiopeia
         in stately lazy eights
         across a sequined floor
         a thousand light years wide,

         to wave a red cape at Taurus
         and shout Olé, jigging
         to a quasar’s blips, as if one moment of truth
         could drive a sword
         through a dilemma’s horns.
   
         Below galactic nebulae
         I wanted to feel neutrinos comb
         through my thinning hair
         and believe that I was a bald eagle
         devouring a snake,

         that I was the coffin clasping the corpse
         and the womb embracing the fetus,
         that my face, round as the Aztec calendar,
         was—Montezuma—ageless.
         For seven earthly minutes
 
         in darkness I wanted to believe
         that I flew at more than light speed
         so fast I viewed the past:
         the bang, the blaze, the breast
         of the new sun suckling planets.

         4                                                          

         Mother, I used to believe you would turn
         Quetzalcoatl’s tail feather
         into a pen to write the Great American Novel.
         You played “Cielito Lindo” on the guitar
         and said the sky was so pretty

         over Acapulco that your novel would end
         with the words of a widow
         at dusk: “Mira el sol.”
         I borrowed that line in a poem. My dreams
         were more vivid back then than my waking days.

         But fifty revolutions around a star
         eclipsed the dark and made me see
         that I could take up your pen
         and harness the horse-headed
         sun to a thought that set out

         aeons ago to brighten on this page,
         to flare like a meteor here:
         that the light which surrounds us
         and comes from within us—false
         dawn flooding ditches,

         drenching herders, goats—
         is a fountain of youth
         wherein we shine,
         primeval Mother Earth,
         shine all the way home.

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“[T]hroughout this exemplary collection, the actual is perceived in all its four dimensions: the three that are described by the physical world, and the fourth which lies just behind and is described only by the noumenal eye. . . .

The plain-spoken poet offers us many fine works here, many of these brief lyrics that immediately capture a sentiment, an idea, an odd moment in time. . . .  [E]ven a casual conversational style does not come without hard labor.  In these poems, the labor is of course invisible to us.  We have only these jazzy lines: poems that are enjoyable and, in several instances, significant.”

—Frederick Smock, American Book Review

 
“The poems in The Parable of Fire are strong and full of a hyperbole which, in less capable hands, would parody themselves, but which Reiss uses to spirit the poems even in their darkest hours.  They are sensual and witty poems that speak of real and imagined experience.  And even though one sees Reiss’s real-life salt-top reflected in the total eclipse’s / frost-white corona, what makes this book picking up is that you’ll quite possibly recognize your own experience as well.”

 —Mike Chasar, Dayton Daily News

 “Joining in the spicy and sensual. . .in The Parable of Fire, his brilliant and buoyant third collection, Reiss spans Mexico, Israel, ancient Rome and Central Park, traveling through real and imagined time.  The common thread is characters with balls and spirit, raging against natural and emotional disaster.”

—Susan Shapiro, St. Petersburg Times

 
“From the dark ruminations of ‘Castrati in Caesar’s Court’. . .and ‘Memorial Quilt, Central Park’. . .to the hard-boiled nostalgia of ‘Mexico’. . .Reiss imagines himself into situations rich with the bitterness of loss or deprivation.  The volume concludes on a positive note, however, with one of Reiss’s best poems, ‘Eclipse the Dark/ My Fiftieth Birthday: July 11, 1941,’ in which his fear of aging and death is transformed into a celebration of ‘the light which surrounds us / and comes from within us’—a conclusion that confirms the close attention Reiss pays the world in even the collection’s darkest explorations.”

—Publishers Weekly