Thunder, Lightning, And Urban Cowboys
by g emil reutter
Reviewed by Steven Croft

Thunder, Lightning, And Urban Cowboys
Poetry
Alien Buddha Press, 2021 $10.44, 111 pages
ISBN: 979-8487961204

Thunder, Lightning, And Urban Cowboys (Alien Buddha Press, 2021), the latest volume of poetry by g emil reutter, tells us of both his own life and his city of Philadelphia. Travel is a central theme in the volume and the first poem is a baroque description of Philadelphia's main commuter train station, with "Encased cathedral windows in travertine walls," "porticoes of classical columns," where "Hancock's archangel rises from Tennessee marble...looks to coffered / ceiling, rests between art deco chandeliers." In some poems, travel from Philadelphia does occur, either by train, for example, "Screeches and Sighs," or by car, "Washington Street." Most travel is within the limits of Philadelphia and is not by car -- though the speaker owns a car as a few poems, like the title poem, indicate -- but by foot, like a medieval mendicant priest. The collection's second poem, "Walking," begins:

I walk through the early morning mist
jacket begins to soak with each step
In this walk I see things I would have
never noticed otherwise. A fresh look
at the everyday, of the spectral, of the
kaleidoscopic....

This beginning makes me think of George Oppen's volume, Of Being Numerous, which begins with, "There are things / We live among 'and to see them / Is to know ourselves.'" I think Oppen and reutter are kindred philosophical poets, though their books are separated by half a century. Both use a city and its inhabitants -- in Numerous New York City -- to expound on the mysteries of both city and life. Ultimately, Thunder, Lightning, And Urban Cowboys is about the speaker's travel through a life blocked in -- in both the artistic sense and in the confining sense -- by Philadelphia. It is a street-level account of life, much more the city of "Rocky" jogging past the morning sounds of shopkeepers' wet sidewalk brooms than the city of the Comcast CEO living a hermetically sealed high-rise existence. The remote luxury and careers of the rich are not reutter's speaker's purview. In this peregrination reutter's speaker finds, in mid-life, salvation in devotion to family, even as he continues to describe the city's poor and working underclass, which poems like "Lawn Mower Man" and "Jimmy T. and Moses" tell us was the province of his own beginnings. Remarkably too, in the middle of the city, the natural world offers beauty and a restful feeling of at-homeness-with-nature.

Many of reutter's human subjects are misfits, outcasts, day laborers. He feels the vibration in "In the City" of the city's hum: "You can feel it / part of it is inside you / the beat, beat, beat / of the city and it is / on the street you see / it, hustle and bustle / of ubers and trolleys of / subway trains...." But this pace can leave behind, be a malevolent force to, the old, the ill-equipped, the flawed and pitiable. In "The Good Fight -- For Jim," an elegy for a construction or maybe public works crew chief, "Jim" disappears from the street where he worked daily: "fact / was no one had noticed you / were gone except me and a few / old ladies." And then returns:

You were who wide
shouldered reappeared in just
a month as cocky as ever yet

your shoulders had rounded
your eyes were a bit sunken....

you tilted while swinging a
sledgehammer, you kept on swinging....

directing the workmen
getting things done.

When Jim disappears again, the speaker tells us, "In less than a week, your / image had faded from this place...." This is who reutter's speaker sees and memorializes, someone whom only he and "a few old ladies" even missed. I think of an infamous at the time event in art history when Gustav Courbet put laborers and peasants on the oversized canvasses reserved for history's "great men" for a nineteenth century Paris exhibition. In "Breaking Silence" reutter's speaker passes a silent neighborhood bum every day on his favorite bench, "gaze fixed, / not aware of anything around you." Then one day:

Today you sit in a lotus position, large feet rest on
thighs, you oooooom, mmmmmmmm, the only
noise they hear as they pass by. After an hour a
passerby says hello, you ask for assistance as your
legs have locked. He reaches in for your feet as
the stench wafts into his nostrils, slowly he releases
your legs, you tell him you're a yogi. He smiles
walks to the water fountain and washes his hands.

In Of Being Numerous George Oppen says "the fortunate / Find everything already here. They are shoppers, / Choosers, judges; And here the brutal / is without issue." Soon after, Oppen quotes from Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, "he who will not work shall not eat," and Oppen's subsequent poetry goes on to imply what Kierkegaard goes on to explain in Fear and Trembling, that we live "in the world of matter" that is "thrall to the law of indifference." Many, the fortunate, have bread to eat no matter if they work or not. The focus of g emil reutter's poems is on the ill-fated who may or may not work but fail nonetheless. Their endurance within this cycle of universal injustice is an obverse heroism, and, reminiscent of Gustav Courbet in Paris, g emil reutter highlights them.

In the series of poems in the book where the speaker interacts with nature the experience is a healing balm. In fall, in "Urban Garden," for example,

Summer is slowly fading into autumn as October fluctuates
from warmth to frost and yet perennials continue on.
A small flock of Orioles rest in the top of a sycamore....

And in spring, "In the Garden in May,"

Around the old stump of Mimosa, Peonies sprout from
the soil. Stalks of Tiger Lilies, Day Lilies fill the bed as
velvet blue flowers of Irises bend and bow.

However, the speaker's greatest happiness comes from his family. Poems about his daughter, grandchildren, wife are sincere and particularly touching coming from this hard accountant of the often forlorn lives he sees on the streets. In "Holding the World in Your Hands -- For Isabella," he writes a prayer for his newborn granddaughter:

On this day of your birth there is a kind spirit
about you. It is as if you are holding the world
in your tiny hands. May you live your life as
you want, may you be an endless fountain of
goodness, patient in all things, know great love....

In the collection's last poem, "At Almost 62," part confessional poem, part thanksgiving poem for the comfort he has found with his family, the speaker says,

I have lived through great pain, betrayal
of working the delis, car wash, landscaping
factories, mills, politics and yes even with
railroad cops. There were many a woman
many a barstool, yet loneliness haunted me
always. It was combative, uneasy, unhappy
the first three decades of adulthood as if in
a free fall into an endless pit....

And so, four months shy of 62 I write this
laying myself open....

His salvation in late middle age does not come from religion. The poem "Filament" suggests evangelical hucksters using the street-pressures of hunger and cold to reel in the destitute. Another poem, "Faith," details the trappings of a Catholic church, then says, "Today I do not / see the serpent slither on the terrazzo floor though I know he too / comes to this place, sings words from his dead mouth, tempting the / weak; his darkness flows into himself." Rather, we have the impression it is just luck in this material world, like Kierkegaard said, "thrall to the law of indifference" that has made the speaker's personal fate in life a happy one. He has too much humility to consider himself just, but as he honestly considers his past and his present, all through Thunder, Lightning, and Urban Cowboys the reader perceives he has always tried to do the right thing during his struggles. Like Plato believed the just man is happier than the unjust, it is as if there is some poetic justice at work in the advent of happiness in this life's journey.