The Ten-Letter Sign

95 Hope Street, Providence RI

by Brett Rutherford

A man who loved books, and who
assumed that others loved them too,
was inclined, in a town so rich
as Providence, to open a shop,
on Hope Street no less! What street
could be more auspicious?

With pride he marched down
to the sign-maker’s emporium
and ordered his name inscribed
in gilded and calligraphic
letters: J. J. COUTANCHE,

and then, in ten bright red
hand-carven woodblocks,
to be nailed above the window:
B O O K S E L L E R.

It was 1902. Streets teemed
with merchants and salesmen,
workers and well-dressed men
hurrying downtown and back.

Newspapers all folded up
they carried, for lack of better
things to occupy their time.
He would see to that.

He had Dickens by the boxcar,
Shakespeare in every mode
from pocket-plays to massive
collections of all the dramas.

From the French, there was
de Maupassant, so droll and moderne.
From the Russian, the latest
novels, from London, fine
bindings in leather rows,
their marbled edges butterflies.

Although he opened early,
stayed late, only a few
impoverished old ladies came.
Seeing his prices,
    they did not come again.

Gradually he came to see
that much of the day-time traffic
was Irish men and women
headed for mass at Saint Joseph’s
directly across the street.
At noontime, men hurtled by,
on their way to saloons
and boxing matches.
No books in their lunch pails!

After five years of this,
Coutanche developed
the most profound contempt
for the people of Providence.
If only he had gone to Boston.

And then, hearing the bells
that rang when his cash-register
did not, watching smug priests
and the resplendent funerals
one after another, 

it dawn upon him
     to change his profession.
He who had once sewn books
would now sew flesh. He who
had rubbed his hands along
the ribs of a leather binding

would now caress the cheeks
of the freshly-dead. The glue
that repaired and made books
whole when they were damaged,
would now be formaldehyde.

He read up on his new
profession. He would learn
as he went; no need
to take lessons or earn
a certificate. Ready at last

to start his new trade,
he laddered up his storefront,
removing the letters
B O O K S E L L
and had the sign-maker’s
emporium make up and paint
in the same block style
U N D E R T A K

His bargain-basement room
with all its penny discards
and damaged bindings
would now house coffins.

The Irish were not particular.
They needed Granny buried
cheaply and lickedy-split.
The priests, for a commission,
would send the grieving
relatives to his door.

He could not make them read,
but, damn, he would
bind them up handsomely
in shiny black caskets!

 

What the War Did

by Brett Rutherford

He blocked a door
I wished to pass through.

His muscled arm,
sweat-beaded
in August heat,
was not going to budge.

“I see the way you look at me,”
he muttered, unsmiling.
“I’ve heard about you.
I know you want me.” —

“That’s just not so,” I said.
I did not say,
“I’m not like that.”
There was no use pretending.

He flexed his arm; his chest
expanded. “I have
a perfect body. I know
you want to touch it.

“They say, at the gym,
I’m like a Greek statue.
If you saw me naked —
best thing that ever
happened to you.”

Imagining myself
in the aftermath,
black-eyed in an alley,
I said, “No thanks,”
Homeward I went,
circling around and back
to be sure I was not followed.

Drafted and gone
to Vietnam, he returned,
shrapnel in skull, with half
his perfect Greek statue
weak and immobilized.

All I can think of today,
passing among
the plaster casts
of discus throwers and warriors
in the sculpture gallery —

figures even now
I do not dare to touch —

is that long-ago offer,
and my refusal.

Not Years Enough

by Brett Rutherford

How many autumns more? I cannot guess.

How slowly thirteen moons go rolling by,

how achingly the thirty dozen days

count off the torn inked sheets of calendar.

Life wrinkles silently, by phases imperceptible

the skull and bones show through the flesh.

More than the other signs of passing

the shelf of unread books accuses me —

not years enough to read them all!

And all those books unwritten, languages

to learn the lilt of, music to shape

beneath the independent fingers —

millions of words and thousands of melodies.

No matter what, the end must come

before the final page is writ, the coda sung.

Composers dreaded to start their Ninth

of symphonies, but trembled all the more

when the Ninth was done, behind them.

How many symphonies would they eke out

before the unrelenting knock of Fate?

If only Sleep, that dark-eyed panda,

were less the brazen thief — if only dreams

could quicken the long drear nights

with more than a passing vision.

I do not need to dream-quest Mt. Yaanek —

a quiet study would do, a reading lamp,

a chair and a sturdy book. My ka,

my lazy double, my astral body

can lounge on a hammock with a Dickens novel,

or browse through the night-locked Athenaeum.

Never too late to learn the names of trees,

of sleeping birds and withered flowers.

Or maybe I’d walk with book in hand

barefoot in graveyard, a midnight reader

of horror tales, epic reciter.

I’d make the dead listen to the Faerie Queene,

count on their fingers the knights and Moors

of the endless Orlando Furioso,

wear them out with the embracing lists,

the straw that stuffs the Song of Myself.

Maybe my eyes would retrace Shakespeare.

But this is Autumn: lamp-dousing time

for my waking self, long nights sliding

to the gravity of solstice, dead leaves

like pages escaping me unreadable.

Not years enough to read them all,

not years enough to count them!

From Poems from Providence, 1991.

Underfoot

by Brett Rutherford

If, on a New York sidewalk, you
walk amiss, the foot first feels it —
some gelid and formless object
that will take hours to remove
from the shoe-sole’s nicks and crannies.
One rapid inhalation tells
if it be horse or dog in scent —
but no! obnoxious, odorous,
it is a Trump I trod upon.

An Afterword for Matthew Paris

by Brett Rutherford​

Dante! -- one sight -- and then
no more of Beatrice, a life
of yearning for an already-
departed Muse. Matthew!
You lucky dog! -- With Jane,
you had a Muse who stayed.

I Dreamt I Was Dante (Revised)

Henry Holiday - Dante and Beatrice (Google Art Project)

by Brett Rutherford 

I dream in mezzanotte silver-gray,
donning the robes of aging Alighieri,
sandalled and aching with brittle legs,
heeding the call of Thanatos —
waking or sleeping? —
I do not know! I feel the dew
upon my ankles, but these feet are numb,
my ankles bony knobs, my toes
the neglected bird-claws of an exile.

The years have browned and scourged
my limbs. An umber moon,
senile amid the drooling clouds,
tilts earthward and winks at me,
changeless and blistering.
the knowing eye of eternity, 

Amid a cypress grove, whose rippled leaves
cat-fur the rigid columns of the sky,
the tree-trunks are deeply furrowed
with weeping moss, and blue drear tears,
unbearable in daylight, collect. How cool
they are, how wise, reflecting in leaf-cups
each one the tiny faces of moon and Venus
(so must we mortals, in mirror'd shields
look on the Gorgon face of Love!) 

Among the trees, close-packed, a maze
made from slab-walls of quarry stone —
square blocks of some god’s
abandoned temple? — an idle Pharaoh’s
never-completed pyramid? —
now an unpeopled catacomb roofed by a vault
of stars! The maze invites my errant feet
to tread its ever-regressive avenues.

You need not tell me what is there.
No carving, no placard
    with a pointing arrow
has been prepared for me,
yet I already know the place
my demon-guided steps will take me. 

At the far heart of this stone-cypress maze,
in a niche cut out of purest marble,
on a pediment of onyx, Beatrice waits.
She is already dead, and I may die
before I ever find her resting place.
There may be stairs beneath it,
     too many to count.

That is the journey, and there is no Virgil,
and although I have read him, his silver lines
fade now to dust motes in my memory.

Beatrice! No matter how long, how fast
I walk, I am no nearer you
than that first sight, when you,
thirteen, scorned to return my gaze.

 --November 16, 2018
Revised and expanded June 22, 2026

Where the Ashes Went

by Brett Rutherford

Drunken half-brother blurts out
his memories of the dead.
Having no funds
for plot or stone,
they dug with bare hands
a hole for grandma,
right next to grandpa’s grave.
No one was looking
as the spade went in,
disturbing the thick turf grass,
soft clover, tough dandelions,
How deep? Who knows?
They dug until it seemed enough,
then in went the ashes,
and the little bone fragments
from the paper bag’s bottom.
No marker, no paperwork,
no money spent
on the damn undertaker —
serves them right.
At least they would always know
where grandma rested.

As for our mother,
she always said, laughing,
“Just throw my ashes
mid-bridge, right into
the mighty Youghiogheny.”
Vaguely she knew how the Monongehela,
then the Ohio, then the Mississippi
currents might carry her
(unless she silted down).
“At last I’ll get to see the world,”
she said. That’s what they did:
the ashes, in the humid air,
fell in a straight line
to the dark and rapid waters.
The inedible fish
flapped with their fins
to spread the ashes.

So now when someone asks.
“So, where is your mother buried?”
I am able to say, with some assurance,
“A coral reef somewhere
inside the Bermuda Triangle.”

The Morning Anatomy Check

by Brett Rutherford

Pavel, on waking up,
holds back eye-opening
until he checks
with anxious fingers
whether his nose
is in its proper place —
god forbid
you should lose your nose!

Next, and even more concerned,
he gently unfolds
the tangled blanket
to check down below —
god forbid
you should lose your penis!

All is well. All is well.
He shudders to think
of poor cousin Dimitri
who awoke one morn,

his nose between his legs,
and his manhood dangling
beneath his forehead.
Now just imagine that,
having to go about,
shorts over head,
eyes looking out
from cotton-stretch leg-holes,

the stifled nose below
enduring the smells
the trousers accumulate.
A sneeze down there
is not a pretty picture!

For Pavel, at least,
it is a normal day.
He can open one eye,
the left one always first,
and then the other —
eyes in their sockets,
mind you, and not
on the fingertips
like cousin Masha,
one for the annals of medicine!

The things that can happen
during a sound sleep
are better not thought of.

A Secret Birth

     by Brett Rutherford

     After a Callimachus fragment, Aetia, 48

Three hundred Titan years old Kronos slept
while young Zeus and his enamor’d Hera
coupled without let-up, nights — and days, too!
Nectars narcotic they sent
     to the watchful and jealous father,
by the hands of garlanded Dryads,
and, from the lips of Iris, distracting
rumors of some trifles and petty strifes
whose answered he could delegate, then turn
his pillows over for another nap.

Then from Zeus’s labors
     and Hera’s womb’s machinery,
with clank and clatter,
     there came such a birth,
red-light the sky from pole to pole, a cry
as loud as a factory whistle, a smack
as of the first bright anvil, ever, struck
by the world’s first hammer, forged from ore.

Hera, whom Zeus hung upside down, cut cord
with her own sickle knife and cried the name
of their dear new Olympian:
“Hephaestos, the gods’ armory, be born!”

The Ox of Dryops

     by Brett Rutherford

     After a Fragment from Callimachus, Aetia, 24

Now Heracles, in company
of his young son, was slowed
when a thorn, which pierced
the boy’s tender foot
made him unable to walk.
The way was long, across
the plowed fields of Dryops,
and the solar disk seemed
uncommonly hot upon them.
Hungry and out of sorts,
young Hyllus tore at Heracles’ hair.

Just then came Thiodamus,
spindly on nimble feet,
yet still a mighty man
from the looks of him,
into the might hero’s sight.
Across the deep, dry fallow
the old man goaded on,
a ten-foot snapping pole
in one arm, a lazy brown ox.

Hailing the stranger, Heracles,
the generous donor of so many
deeds and labors, and once
he had praised the land and the fields,
and the beneficent orb
whose heat beat down upon them,
inquired, “I great pray a boon.
This wounded child calls out
for nourishment. If anything
your shoulder-bag can spare,
a mouse-size morsel, bread,
or a mouthful of fruit or nut,
would make our moving on
more swift, and quiet him.
I shall always remember you,
how amid your labors,
you were kind to another.”

The arrogant ox-herd
whipped out the floating pole
from ox-back to the very nose
of Heracles. “You, beggar,
and a fool to boot, know
ye not I am King of these parts?
Only a knave can claim
to hunger here. Pass on,
and may the burning noon
     finish you.” The King spat
and turned his back to them.

So what was a demi-god to do?
He seized the howling ox
and hurled it so far up
it looked no bigger than
a starling in silhouette,
and when it came down, its back
was broken. It bellowed. It died.

As Thiodamus fled
to summon his forces,
or hide beneath his blankets,
father and son devoured
the beast from tongue to tail.

Thus, ever and anon,
the uncharitable must pay.

Love Locks

Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum Door. Photo by the author.

by Brett Rutherford

A blight
on urban bridges,
unwelcome as dead rats
or pigeon-droppings,
padlocks entwined
with chain-link fencing,
lipstick initialed
with names, initials,
swearing eternal love
as rust corrodes
and shifting fancies
make mockery
of mawkish vows.

Some vows are serious,
kept grudgingly
against the decades.
Though she is gone,
he plods along
until a second Mrs
love-locks him in.

And just in case,
the first wife's mausoleum
upon its barred door
has a double chain,
the sternest padlock
impervious to weather.

Old love is locked
securely in.
Better safe than sorry.

The Poor Man's Leviticus 3 - Burnt Offerings

by Brett Rutherford 

3

When the earth was young,
the even-younger gods
came down upon
the human altars smiting.
To watch was to die,
as flame and lightning
cindered up to ash
the living victims.
The gods consumed us,
bones and all.

Later, their appetites,
assuaged with human flattery,
demanded hecatombs
of cattle, sheep, and goats,
oxen piled up and laced
with a delicate frill of doves.
(In lean times, they were offered less.)

To watch was to die,
or so the priests maintained,
but there no longer came
the forked-down lightning,
nor did the thunder rend
the heavens at each god-feast.

Why did the priests now demand
a tithe of timber, and casks
of ever-more-flammable oil?

Why were the temple doors barred
after the slaughtered ox
no longer bled or trembled?
Why did the limp pile
of lambs and turtledoves
just lie there, unbitten
if those above were hungry?

Don’t peek, the priests would say.
Our kinder Lord
     wants only the entrails
anyway. Some days
the mere scent of a burning ox
suffices. Are we not blessed?

Don’t peek, the poor are told
(for they are easily agitated),
as the priests and their families
enjoy their roast-beef dinners.
It is hard work, they insist
to keep the smiting heavens up
and about their heavenly business,
and to leave us poor sinners alone.

Poe and Mrs. Whitman Come to Life in Providence - A Flashback to 1987

Illustrations by Richard Sardinha

 

This note was mailed to various friends in January, 1987:

January 1987 began in dreary Providence with the at-long-last publication of my novel, Piper. Zebra Books issued it at the very end of December, with a splendid cover that has induced booksellers to give it very prominent display. I have seen it everywhere — Walden Books, B. Dalton, Barnes and Noble, drugstores, supermarkets, discount stores, you name it. The few disinterested readers I've heard from seemed to like it.

Even better news is that the publisher loves the book and wants to make a deal to do two more-the second of which would be a hardcover with major national publicity and advertising. So, things are hopping on the fiction front, even if the royalties won't start coming until July.

The most exciting event in January was the publication of the new Poet's Press edition, Last Flowers: The Romance Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman. The publishing party was no less than a dramatic recreation of the thwarted romance of Poe and the Rhode Island poetess, in a play by Norman George called Poe and Mrs. Whitman: A Memoir. The one-hour, one act play was performed twice on January 24 to a total of 260 attendees in the very room in the Providence Athenaeum library where Poe and Helen met and courted. The library reading room was transformed into a little theatre with a very atmospheric set. Excellent lighting, costumes and makeup made the time-travel to Poe's era most convincing. Helen recounted her romance with Poe in an 1860 visit to the library, and Poe appeared as a ghost, reading "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and selections from his lectures and criticisms.

The performance by actor Norman George, who tours nationally with his one man show, Poe...Alone, was electrifying. The actress who performed Helen, who shall remain nameless, did not, alas, do justice to Norman's fine script. Large sections of the script were omitted in shocking memory lapses by the starlet. In the second performance, the audience sat stunned as she introduced herself twice, froze, and then said, "Excuse me, I'll be back in a moment." The actress was gone, Poe was hidden behind a curtain, and the audience stared at an empty stage. Moments passed. We waited for the sound of a gunshot, the thud of a body hitting the floor, the slam of a distant door as the distracted actress fled to the street. But no, she came back and acquitted herself, performing most of the script. A close call, and a harrowing moment for your intrepid publisher. (One can only imagine how the actor/playwright felt behind the curtain!) If we do the show again, it may be with Muppets, with Kermit the Frog as Poe, Miss Piggy as Helen, and Gonzo as The Raven.

Most viewers of the play did not perceive these production problems to the extent that we did, of course. There was generous applause, and strong interest in Poe and Helen was generated. Sales of the book were brisk.

And now to the book-the biggest and finest Poet's Press edition ever.

More than 100 pages in 8-1/2 x 11 inches, the volume is printed on acid­-free paper and premieres my new type design, "Lenore,' in a generous eighteen-point size. The book opens with a 9,000-word essay by, as Miss Piggy would say, mo. The text is a garland of poems by Poe and Helen Whitman, recreating their romance and the decades after his death when she was his most ardent defender. (If Helen had not written a little book, Edgar Poe and His Critics, in 1860, you might not be reading Poe today, except perhaps in French.)

The book contains suitably Gothick illustrations in the form of a dozen drawings by Rhode Island fantasy illustrator Richard Sardinha. If you haven't ordered a copy of this very special book, I urge you to do so. It is the ne plus ultra of the 119 books done by The Poet's Press. I wish all of my friends could have been present for the atmospheric and festive premiere!

The Providence Athenaeum has mounted a month-long exhibition of their Poe and Helen materials, including Poe first editions and autographs-some really fine and precious materials. Included in the exhibit are the drawings for Last Flowers and a montage of working materials from the design of the Lenore type face. The show will run until February 21st and marks the first time a Poet's Press book has been used in a library or museum exhibition. Quite an honor and quite a thrill to see one's work under glass.

The local newspapers ran a number of excellent stories about the play and the book, and there was a radio interview with Mr. Poe and another one to come with the humble publisher. I'll also promote the book at readings in New York (Feb 1 at Chez Emilie Glen) and in May at North Adams State College (MA).