These Trespasses (review)

"Live and learn," the saying goes. But any recent horror film offers a plethora of examples indicating that such is not always the case. The not-so-merry-go-round of the past seems to hold a magnetic fascination for some; they keep jumping on for another ride. Perhaps a more useful saying might be, "Reflect honestly on life, and you might learn from it."

Such reflection is evident throughout Jim Reese's recent collection of poems, These Trespasses. A learning process is recorded here, and honest reflection is at the heart of it. In the poem "Homegrown," for example, the narrator reflects on a summer he spent salvaging lumber from a fallen barn with the help of a boy named George. When the job was done

. . . and I returned to graduate schoolI forgot about George.Two years later on the local newsI see a picture of the house,the two gardens gone to weedsand a reporter tells meabout the foster parents,arrested for tyingthe child to his bed for dayson end-feeding himhomegrown habanero peppers.All this education, I think,and I never stopped once to ask him:is everything okay?

In another poem, "Windmills Without Wings," the narrator relates an accident he was involved in on the farm because of his lack of experience with driving a tractor: ". . . their tractor had gone awry. / . . . leaving me to take the blame."

Many of the poems in These Trespasses are concerned with the narrator experiencing situations that can be learned only by living through them. In his recording of them, although the narrator tends to use language as "blasted" and "tough" as the country in "13 County," "where I'm talking to you from," there is a ring of honest innocence at the heart of These Trespasses that brings to mind a scene from Larry McMurtry's Leaving Cheyenne, in which Gideon Fry, unhappy with his father's view of the world, says, "'That's a pessimistic damn thing to say . . . Why, I think life's a damn sight more fun than that.'" To which his father replies, "'You ain't lived one.'"

These Trespasses also records the hard lives of men like Edsel Crampit in "Euchre at Two" and Floyd Knipplemeyer in "Willing and Ready," and it introduces some life-hardened characters, like Vernon and Felice, in "Ten Penny High":

Before long Vernon drifts offsomewhere else, sometimesphysically, looking for what he calls histen penny high."Some sugar is right throughthat bedroom door," Felice whispers,tonguing our ears.

Like the characters presented in so many horror films, Vernon and Felice seem to have lived a lot but not learned much from it, as is evident in "707 Florence Boulevard":

We danced with Vernon's wife,until she talked dirty to us. And the nightshe asked Chuck Schmal to feel her up,and he didn't-the night she stabbedVernon in the stomach because he couldn'tget it up-was the last timewe bought beer on a regular basis.

In contrast, it appears that the narrator of These Trespasses has learned a good deal from the lives recorded here, as the final section of the book reflects a major shift in his perspective. Beyond the "blasted country" of the book's first section, past the "Ten Penny High" and the "forties and smokes" of the second, he records in the final section of the book, in "Feel Us Shaking," an awareness of the beauty and fragility of the present moment:

I watch my daughter dreamingfor another hour until she wakes.I pick her up and hold on-tight.

And from this perspective, a life now shared with a wife and new daughter, he casts a hopeful, if timorous, glance toward the future-a future wholly dependent on what he has learned through honest reflection on the events of his life thus far, including, and especially, These Trespasses.