The Tea Party: A Childhood Memory

The Tea Party

by Brett Rutherford

Scottdale, PA, childhood on Kingview Road. (Revision of an older poem.)


New neighbor girls have settled in.
We hear the squeals and screams,
the mother-calls and father-scoldings
through the open windows.
An angry hedge divides us in back,
though our houses lean together,
shingles and sagging porches
almost blending, identical
weeds abuzz with the same
busy-body bumblebees.

The low-slung church

of solemn Mennonites

sits glum and silent

across the street.

The girls' names are Faith and Abby,

ten and seven in stiff blue dresses.

Their parents seldom speak to us.

Just up the hill, behind a fence,

white-washed and cedar-lined,

Charlene and Marilyn,

the Jewish girls

live in the great brick house

(anything brick

is a mansion to us).

I play canasta with Marilyn (my age),

learn to admire her parents,

watch as they light

the Hanukkah candles,

move among them summers

as hundreds congregate

at their swimming pool.

Their mother loves opera,

but not, she says,

not Wagner.

One August day,

an invitation comes,

crayon on tablet paper,

for tea with Faith and Abby.

My mother says, Be nice and go.

I sit in their yard

with toy furniture.

The doll whose daddy

I'm pretending to be

has one arm missing.

The tea, which is licorice

dissolved in warm water,

is served in tiny cups,

tarnished aluminum,

from a tiny aluminum teapot.

I want to gag

from the taste of it,

but I sip on and ask for more.

Now Faith addresses me.

"I'll dress the baby

and we shall take her to church." —

"Oh, we don't go to church,"

I told my newfound Mrs.

"Never, ever?"

"Not even once?" —

I shook my head —

"I've never set foot inside a church."

"That's just what Daddy told us!"

Abby exclaimed. "You'll go to Hell!"

"You'll go to Hell and be damned!"

the sisters chanted,

"You'll go to hell and be damned!"

"What else does your Daddy say?"

I asked them. "He says

you'll go to Hell and be damned,

because you're atheists and heathens."

Faith looked fierce,

She poured more tea

and made me take it,

as if it were holy water,

as if I would drink

baptism by stealth.

She raised her cup daintily,

glanced and nodded

at the fence and the cedars.

My eyes followed.

"Charlene and Marilyn

will go to Hell, too,

right to the bottom

of the flaming pit,

because they're Jews

and murdered Jesus.

Would you like ice cream now?"

The Cemetery at Eylau, 1807

THE CEMETERY AT EYLAU, 1807

by Brett Rutherford

The Battle at Eylau, East Prussia (now Bagrationovsky, Kaliningrad, Russia) As told to Victor Hugo by his uncle Louis-Joseph Hugo.Adapted and expanded from the Victor Hugo poem, "The Story of Louis-Joseph."

1.

Eylau, the graveyard in Kaliningrad, Eylau in East Prussia:
Eylau, the battle rather. Louis-Joseph was then
just Captain, and had earned the Cross, not that
it mattered in ’07 when men in war were naught
but shadows and numbers to those who counted.
He would never forget Eylau, a quiet spot
(East Prussian then), mist-clotted fields,
scant woods. The regiment before a ruined wall,
an angry old belfry frowning down Lutherly,
gravestones one could not read, slabs a-crumble
and flat, sunken and swelling in humps of grass.

Beringssen, superstitious, shuddered to stay here,
but the Emperor would not retreat, not now, while
the threat of blizzard hunched in the clouds.
Napoléon himself went by, sunglassing the sky,
calling orders as he ant-scanned the horizon.
The word spread fast in spiderweb gossip, soldier-
to-soldier: “A battle, for certain, tomorrow.”
They saw the shapes of women and children, fleeing,
huddled forms with knapsacks, potato-brown.
He looked along the ditches’ edge, anxious to hear
the rumble of horses and wagons — but silence.

In the wall’s shelter they made a campfire.
They made giant soldier-shadows, coming and going.
The colonel summoned him: “Hugo!” — “Present!” —
“How many men are with you here?” — “A hundred.” —
“A plague! That’s far too few. No matter then —

You take them all.” — “Where, Colonel?” — “Go down there
and get yourselves all killed in the graveyard.”
The captain laughed. “Down there! That is
     the very place to die.”
He had a gourd, a decent wine. He drank.
He passed it to the discerning colonel,

who savored, nodded. Their eyes met. Each understood.

A chill breeze harrowed the empty branches.
“We’re never far from Death,” the Colonel conjectured,
“Much as I love my life.” He raised the gourd again.
“Much as I love the real, we who know wine like this
know very well how to die.” Grimly, he laughed,
then swept his hand over the graveyard slope.
“Yours is the point they will menace the most.
No matter the cost — hold on. The battle’s real crux
is here.” Climbing to the wall-top, he scanned the ground.
“Have you some dry straw, at least, for bedding?” —
          “None, sir.” —
“Then on the ground it is.” Soft graves, headstones,
a sunken spot or two, they’d find a way.
— “My soldiers can sleep no matter where,” he boasted.
— “And how’s your drummer-boy?” —
          “As brave as a rooster!” —

“That’s good. So let him crow, and beat the charge
at odd times, day and night, run to and fro
so it sounds like an army is crowded in here.” —
“Did you hear that, boy?” called Hugo. A tow-head raised
from a snow-bank and cried, “Yes, sir! Fear not!
I can make enough noise for a Roman legion!”

Taking him aside, the Colonel ordered:
“It is imperative you hold this graveyard
till six tomorrow evening. Hold ground,
be you alive or dead. And thus, farewell.”
He gave a swift embrace and firm salute.

2

Leaving behind the merry fire, they scaled
the crumbling wall to down-slope cemetery.
The old gravestones and their death-headed mounds
peaked with snow-clumps, rolled on and on like waves.
The snow was far deeper than they expected.
In tattered cloaks they sank to its chill-bed.
They slept well, as men of war learn slumber
without a thought of waking, or dying.

He woke at dawn. New snow had covered him
and made his lips icy. He sat up like a revenant
from the grave-mound he had chosen, poor Johan H-
who, dead, had no choice in the manner of bunking.
He was head-to-foot in a snowy shroud.
He stood up and shook it off, shivering.
A bullet breezed by his ear. “Ho!” he shouted.
“Lookout, what see you?” — “Nothing, sir! Nothing!”
“That nothing was no housefly. Sound the reveillée!”

Up popped the nine-and-ninety heads of men
from the Lutheran ground that had never seen
such an Easter rising. The sergeant called, “To arms!”
Red dawn was split in two by inky clouds,
a bloody-mouth leer at humanity,
sun-rise, Death-rise, the lamp of War. “To arms!”

For all the horn-call and drumming, the pots-
and-pans clamor of readiness, they in their turn
got only silence from the unseen enemy.
The shot he heard was but a random thing,
much like a ballroom orchestra player
who by chance picked up a horn and blew it.

Though blood was iced, they were warm for battle.
On the plains, the silent armies waited.
The graveyard-men were set as bait and lure ,
on which the enemy might spend and waste.
They gathered along the protecting wall,
each one prepared to bleed for every foot deterred.

3.

And then it came on: six hundred field guns
roared their iron mouths, booming and thundering.
Lightning and fire-burst flashed from hill to hill.
Then Hugo’s drummer beat the charge, in answer.
A colossus of trumpets answered back.
Down came the leaden shots upon the graves,
as if the very tombs were their targets.
Starlings and crows exploded in black clouds
from the shaken church’s crumbling steeple.

One corpse but lately dead popped up half-height
as a mortar exploded his fine monument,
a preacher from the look of him, black-raimented
with a bony hand stretched out in admonition.
Skulls rolled through the snow like aimless billiards.

Then a day-defying darkness seized them.
Dawn would not give to day, the sun was shamed,
smoke rolled onto and up the slope, to wall,
o’er-reaching it, up to the church itself.
And then, in clot of gun-cloud came more snow,
a steady, head-pounding downfall of heaviness.
Soldiers against the wall were whitened ghosts,
others upon the ground a rose-burst of bleeding.
Down on the plain, fires rose from the smoke-sea —
villages now plundered were set a-light.
’til the whole horizon seemed one vast torch.

They stood against the wall, and they waited.
Till six o’clock tomorrow! the Colonel had said:
How could they make their shivering presence matter?
Not crouching this way like hares before a hunter!
“Morbleau!” said the lieutenant next to him,
“Our chance may come, and may come but once.
Let us advance now —” and then a bullet
ripped through his throat and he fell trembling, dead.

Napoléon, the Emperor, had set them here,
they knew not why, except to be a puppet show
of easy things to shoot at, a hundred armed men
pretending to be a thousand, by dint of din.
What would he tell the men? Their only goal
was to survive until a gold watch clicked on six.

He raised his sword, swinging it this way-that way.
“Courage!” he bellowed, choke-full of rage and manhood.
Out and apart from the others he stood.
He felt it not – not the thing that ripped him,
his hand limp, sword on the ground before him.
“No matter, for I have another hand,” he laughed.
He used his good hand shake the numb one,

counting fingers, all there, thanks be to God!
He took up the sword again. Soldiers’ faces blurred;
some seemed to sink and falter. “Ah, my friends,
we have left hands for the Emperor, too!”

Too soon, the boy’s drum-beating stopped. He found
the staggering drummer. “No time for fear!” —
“Six hours I’ve drummed. Six! I’m not afraid.
I’m hungry,” the drummer boy protested.
The ground rose up — like an earthquake, it seemed —
the drummer was gone — Hugo’s sword was gone.
A cry went up to heaven, coarse like crows:
Victoire, it cawed. Victoire! Victoire! Victoire!

“Let anyone who lives, stand up! Report!” —
The drummer stood. “I’m here. I didn’t die!”
The sergeant from behind a tree: “I’m here!”

The Colonel rushed in on horseback, red sword
edged with the blood of retreating Russians.
He approached, saluted. “Who won the battle, sir?” —
“You did, you, Captain Hugo. How many still live?”
And Hugo answered, “Three!”

[Revised May 2019].

Oct 25, 2018

Subjects: Eylau, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, translations

Greek and Latin Poetry -- Free Books to Download

From The Poet's Press Links Page, here are links to my recommendations for free books you can download of Greek and Roman poetry. Everyone needs a Greek slave, and a Roman master.

GREEK AND LATIN POETRY

Amos, Andrew, ed. Gems of Latin Poetry. A collection of poems in Latin from various eras (including British poems composed in Latin). An excellent bilingual resource with the original Latin, prose  or verse English translations, and commentary. Odd items include a poem attributed to Julius Caesar, a Latin poem condemning Milton's works to be burned at the stake, and Latin love poems addressed to Lucrezia Borgia. A treasure trove for those searching obscure and interesting Latin poems to translate or paraphrase.  From the Internet Archive in PDF and other file formats. 

THE CLASSICS, GREEK AND LATIN: The Classics, Greek & Latin; The Most Celebrated Works of Hellenic and Roman Literature, Embracing Poetry, Romance, History, Oratory, Science, and Philosophy -- A handsome series of books published a hundred years ago, edited by a transatlantic group of scholars and translators, intended to present the great Greek and Latin classics to the general reader. The volumes are a mix of prose and verse translations. Here are the volumes that contain poetry:

• Andrew Lang's prose translation of Homer's Iliad. PDF and other formats from The Internet Archive. Lang's style is arcane, and does not compare well with Samuel Butler's prose version (see below). 
• Andrew Lang's prose translation of Homer's Odyssey. PDF and other formats from The Internet Archive. 
• From the same series, a compendium of Didactic and Lyric Poetry from the oldest Greek poets, including Hesiod, Callimachus, Sappho, Anacreon and Pindar. 
• A collection of some of the best-known Greek Dramas, including Prometheus Bound (translated by Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Antigone, and Medea. 
• Prose versions of The Poetry of Virgil, including The Georgics and The Aeneid. 
• The Works of Horace, translated into English prose. 
• Here is the pinnacle of Latin poetry in the volume titled, Amatory, Philosophical, Mythological. This volume includes selections from Lucretius, the great philosopher-poet, the satirist Catullus, the magisterial Propertius, and the first four parts of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 

Richardson, Leon Josiah. A Guide to Reading Latin Poetry. This brief, practical guide explains Latin meters and helps the beginner learn how to read Latin aloud, and how its classical meters work. A stodgy old book, but very useful. 
SAMUEL BUTLER'S PROSE VERSION OF HOMER'S ILIAD. Published in 1898, here is Samuel Butler's fine translation of The Iliad into clear and readable prose. This is an elegant rendering, highly readable, and far enough from our own time that Butler's everyday English sounds just slightly removed and grand.
THE RETURN OF STATIUS. Perhaps it is time for the scorned Roman poet Statius, author of the epic Thebaid, to make a comeback. He is the Stephen King of Roman poetry, full of extremes, the product of Rome at its peak of power and flowering of decadence: "Who can sing of the spectacle, the unrestrained mirth, the banqueting, the unbought feast, the lavish streams of wine? Ah, now I faint…" Here is the Heineman bilingual edition of Statius as a starter on this voluptuous poet. For a taste of the 18th century take on Statius, here is a 1767 English translation of The Thebaid Vol 1, and The Thebaid, Vol 2, whose introduction includes some comments on the critics' disapproval of Statius's unrestrained writing.

The Witches and the High-Court Judge

I promised some Magickally-talented friends that I would make a "helping spell" in the ongoing hex against Judge Kavanaugh. Here is my modest effort, based on a 1609 poem by Ben Jonson.

THE WITCHES AND THE HIGH-COURT JUDGE

by Brett Rutherford

after Ben Jonson


WITCH 1
I have been all day looking after
a Funnel for His Fundament,
for he is like to Bouffe a Biere
as to pour it in his gullet.

WITCH 2
I have been gathering wolves’ haires,
The madd dogges foames, and adders’ eares,
to hie me to the Brewerie
and mix them in his favor’d Bieres.

WITCH 3
I last night lay all lone,
on the ground to hear the Mandrake groan,
and plucked him, to make a Dolle
that hath no Manhood on it, None at all.

WITCH 4
And I ha’ been choosing out this Skull,
from Charnel Houses that were full
and I shall make a Lykeness Doll
that screameth, “I am a Man of  Yale!”

WITCH 5
Under a cradle I did crepe
By day; and when the childe was a-sleepe,
I marked it with the will to tell
That he would four times eff with her anon.

WITCH 6
I had a dagger: what did I with that?
Killed an infant to have his fat.
I’ll carve his name along the blade,
and hope he finds it, nick of time.

WITCH 7
A murderer, yonder, was hung in chaines;
The sun and the wind had shrunk his veins.
A strip of flesh I’ll offer him up, a rag
from the convict to replace his robes.

WITCH 8
The screech-owl’s eggs and the feathers black,
The blood of the frog and the bone in his back
I have been getting. We’ll make him drink
ere that we walk him to the Devil’s Train.

WITCH 9
And I have been plucking (plants among)
hemlock, henbane, adders-tongue.
If he be ever so fond of an Ale,
we shall wizen his innards, head to tail.

WITCH 10
I crept back in a house again, I killed
the black cat, and here is the brain.
Once he has tasted this, his memory
will never again be quite the same.

WITCH 11
I scratched out the eyes of the owl before;
I tore the bat’s wing: what would you have more?
His robe will leap up, so he canna’ see.
If Justice be blind, he blinded must be.


DAME
All, gather all, and bringe him hence.
With him bent o’er, we’ll funnel him
all full of poppy and cypress juice.
All, add the ingredients, all.
There is a mile of intestines to fill.

And while we are here, let every orifice
serve as our Devil’s Treize-Angle.
Into each ear a hornet’s nest I’ll stuff.
Here, sister, is dung well dried
that will cling to his nose-hairs petrified.

That termite nest, well-greas’d by Toads
will just about fill his booming maw.
What judgments he’ll pass! What Odes
he will sing to his clerks and aides!
Not a word he says will be understood.

And as for that Implement he lov’d,
the Mighty Handful, Marriage-Plowe,
we’ll wrap it now in briars. What fun
each time he looks in lust at a maid!

And last and most, ye Coven hags,
be comforted to know he loveth Biere.
Biere that every barmaid and man
shall be compelled to pisse-anoint,
Biere that shall bloat his ulcer-belly,
Biere that shall pass like vinegar a-boil
through his thorn-wrapped passage.

CHORUS
The four-times Eff that thou hast done
shall now be done to thee.

Thus Witches Twelve, unnamèd  We,
shall run a Train on Thee.

Subjects: Witchcraft, Supreme Court, Kavanaugh, witches, hex, Ben Jonson

Getting Your Eye

GETTING YOUR EYE

by Brett Rutherford

Your eyes eluded me again today.
Do not protest they looked for me
when I was not alert: my sole
intent was to discern
the hue of those haunted entrances
to your attention. I failed
again to catch them at home.

A momentary glimpse, between
a blink and a downward glance
showed a dark orb that flitted by,
a ghost traversing your cornea,
gone before I could capture it.

The appetizer came and went.
The main course was finished off
A costly dessert arrived. You smiled.
It slowly vanished in dainty bites
displaying your every perfect tooth.
I have memorized your ear-tracery.
I could draw your nose, the part
of your raven hair. But of the orbs
that guided the eating – nada.

Next time I shall come with a hypnotist,
a color chart, a spectrograph,
to map the shade and boundary
of your irises. That done,
I shall apply my finer arts
toward collecting the rest of you,
for there is a blank in my book
of love-spells that reads:
"Enter eye color here (Mandatory)."

Magic is unforgiving.

Subjects: Love poems, eye color.

The Bubble

Falling in love with someone who later "discovers Jesus" is painful, and the ending is not a happy one. Jesus almost always wins. I found a "juvenilia" poem from my freshman years at Edinboro, still rife with rhymes (a perversion that Whitman wold cure me of), but I was able to touch it up so that I am no longer quite so embarrassed. It's the thought that counts.

THE BUBBLE

by Brett Rutherford

We rule an earth but microns thin,
you and I — we ride on separate
hemispheres in yinyang nevercatch
pursuit — my love and your fear,
spinning and tiding a fevered
planet. A Titan, Kronos, grows
within, grinds nostrils on the pane
of the mind's cool underside:

this shadow of a shadow shouts
its name is God, it slobbers
catechist, Faith-fanged.


The reason'd Sphere is hard —­
a perfect tomb for fiends,
but now our Bubble breaks apart
in demon arm-and-leg flex,
and simple Truth is lost to air.
I love in vain. You flee in terror.


Kronos is loose in the world.

The Thing, unchained, must have its lust
and wrenching out its prison bars,
slays lovers, knocks thrones to rubble,
grinds genius back to dust.
Its vacant eye usurps the stars.


I go to a place of exile.
There is no room for you
and me, and a rampaging deity.

God-love destroyed our love.
God-love destroys everything.
So, let's be only Truth
in one another's eyes
Let's summon Things As They Are,
till every Demon dies.

At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit up this early poem, "October 1967" from The Pumpkined Heart. We all thought the world was coming to an end soon. The Vietnam War divided the country. People were threatening "hippies" with violence. In this "nature poem," written amid the violence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, about the remembered lake and the carillon music from the bell tower, I felt the isolation and anxiety. 
Edinboro State College's carillon bells (real or a recorded) could be heard from afar. I remember going to class hearing "Musetta's Waltz," and coming out of class in the dark hearing Anton Rubinstein haunting melody, "Kammenoi Ostrow." The memory of the Rubinstein music against a fall-winter horizon bleak enough to be Russian, stayed with me.
Now I have rewritten this and added some current allusions, so that it is of 2018, although 95% of the poem is my 20-year-old voice speaking with the trees.  This poem had been excluded from my Anniversarius autumn cycle, but this revision is now counted as part of that grouping. [Revised and expanded again, May 2019.]

ANNIVERSARIUS 44:
AT THE LAKE'S EDGE

by Brett Rutherford

Scorched by the blind frost, the maple leaves are dead,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag, or they are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of identity,
chopped to mulch for next year's garden.


Bird flocks rise in arrow-shaped vectors,
riding the west winds up to escape us.
Leaves fall; they flee.


While all this leaf-holocaust
this flight-to-south abandonment
by nations of birds goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps cornstalk
and the irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?


Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through tree-bared acres 
to the dark line of leaden pines,
mark how the shadows grow bold in the slanting dusk
(it is a warning!), mark how the wind
now sighs like one who cannot be consoled
by hopes about the coming election. Death
weaves through the browning, rigid cat tails.
Bored, they lean sere and childless
by the drained swamp; soon their roots
will meet a gravel barricade, soon
water drained, a concrete wall no seed
can scale, nor root circumference.


The blasted oak wears its dead leaves
as a stubborn beard, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers
wait like mastodons at glacier-edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.
You and I are not part of them, and a third 
of the insects are already gone.)


From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kammenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.
I go to the shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,
sere fathers as old as any gravestone here.
A few leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a defiant dust-devil.
They will return with me
to join my curiosity cabinet
of preserved loves, gelled moments.

Autumn is not and never will be
an ending. Autumn piled on itself
is a bottomless leaf-pile. Plunge in!
Stand here amid the dying bell-tone,
as wind that tasted tundra slaps
your face awake with icy needles.
Kammenoi Ostrow fades to silence.

Where does one make a stand for life?
There is nothing north of you,
and little cause to bird-flee southward.
This is the edge of the world.
This is where the first snow falls.

Subjects: Edinboro, Kammenoi Ostrow, autumn poems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC8ah61cMNw

Go Into Exile, or Remain and Suffer?

Many Russian poets and writers fled into exile to get away from Lenin and Stalin. Most Russian exiles were miserable and depressed. Many Russian writers and poets who remained were imprisoned, or murdered. Anna Akhmatova remained, and her brave lyric poems are Russian icons now. Here is my translation/adaptation of her poem about the choice of fleeing or remaining. Food for thought as some of us think of leaving the United Snakes.

ANNA AKHMATOVA: I'M LIKE A RIVER

Adapted from the Russian by Brett Rutherford

I'm like a river
this heartless epoch turned
from its accustomed bed.
Strayed from its shores
this changeling life of mine
runs off into a channel.

What sights I've missed,
absent at curtain time,
nor there when the house lights dim.
A legion of friends
I never chanced to meet.
Native of only one abode —
city I could sleepwalk
and never lose my way —
my tears preventing eyes
from seeing the dreamt-of
skylines of foreigners!

And all the poems I never wrote
stalk me, a secret chorus
accusing me, biding the day
they'll strangle me.
Beginnings I know,
and endings too,
and living death,
and that which I'll not,
if you please, recall.

Now there's a woman
who's assumed my place;
usurping my name, she leaves
me only diminutives to end
my poems with: I'll do the best I know with them.

Even the grave appointed me
is not my own.
Yet if I could escape my life,
looking straight back at what I am,
I should at last be envious.

Subjects: Russian poetry, Akhmatova, translations, exile.

The Place of Attics

What they say about New England and all the people confined to attics is really true. It is really true.

THE PLACE OF ATTICS

by Brett Rutherford

Hard-rock New England
is a world of attic-dwellers:
spinsters and hermits,
bloodlines of schizophrenia,
tight-shut clapboards,
paint-peeled shutters,
a baleful eye behind
a soiled lace curtain.

Who passed the picket-fence
and glanced into the parlor
as Lizzie Borden
wiped clean the ax-edge,
returned to her bed
with a migraine?

Who idled in Salem
at the old spice shop
as Hester Prynne,
a half-moon frowning
upon her scarlet letter
took basket to market,
and who, averting her gaze,
passed by what locked door
to eavesdrop on Arthur Dimmesdale
self-flogging, his blood beads
spelling the eternal A?
In Adams Fall, We Sinnèd All.

What batly belfry, bell-less
shadowed the wily minister
and his impish daughters,
as they bent pins for the witch-trial —
the spitting pins
they plan to blame on the innocent hag
whose farm and lands they covet?

From what high steeples
does what avenger look down
as the merchant’s gold plate,
the fine furnishings,
the pastoral landscapes,
swell three floors high,
on gold from selling
rum to the Negroes,
molasses to the distillers,
slaves to the sugar planters? 

What starry owl repines
beneath a rotting gable
to survey with unblinking eye
as the miser millionaire
shuffles by, slow-paced
in phlegmy wheeze,
walking a mile in old shoes
to find the cheapest chowder?

Does any widow’s watch
stand guard at night
as trucks roll by,
as slit-eyed criminals
dump toxic waste
behind the schoolyard,
or a barge tips oily sludge
into the harbor?

Up on that mansard height
of City Hall, does even one
of those peregrine falcons
take count of a dollar’s passage
from crack-smoke car-seat 
to bicycle boy,
to the convenience store,
to basement warehouse,
to the unseen drug lord? 

No Athens, Providence:
madhouse-state capital. 
The roads are blocked. 
Hotel rooms lock from the outside in. 
Thieves smirk on the doorsteps; 
they boast of useless crimes, 
confess to hasty interments. 
A tree-squirrel once heard one say
to his baseball-capped brother:  
“I’m just going to rob and rob
      until someone stops me.”

Nothing on high does anything.
The steeples jab Heaven’s eye.
Monotonous, the bells ring on.
Men climb church walls on moonless nights
to steal the lightning rods,
the copper strips from roof to ground.
They’d scrape the gold-leaf halos
from off the painted saints if they could.
The sombre, brown, cathedral ceiling
looks like a never-cleaned toilet bowl.
Hordes hunch in rain each spring,
kneel in a shrine for guidance,
while priests’ hands inch unseen
toward the choirboys’ backsides.
Our Lady among the crawling rats,
tear-streaked in verdigris,
blesses all in diapason tone.

My neighbor, from rooftop eyrie
shouts out from his blackened windows:
“You’re all going to die! All of you!
You’re all going to die.” Another night:
“I want a brain! I want a brain!”
he howls till squad cars’ arrival,
then hurls his television to shards
on the sidewalk below.

On just my block, one attic dweller,
a landlady’s schizophrenic son, hacks
endlessly in smoker’s cough, tubercular;
another houses twin infants mongoloid;
another, a white-haired granny who thrusts
her head out, Medusa locks and all,
to scream at any long-haired man who passes.

I did not live in an attic there, the gods
be thanked, but I wrote in one.

[Revised and expanded May 2019]

SUBJECTS: attics, New England, Rhode Island, Hester Prynne, Lizzie Borden, Providence, insanity, Salem

Death and the Maiden

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

by Brett Rutherford

after the German of Matthias Claudius

The Maiden:

Pass me by, oh, pass me by!

Go, savage skeleton!

I am still young. Go, seducer,

and don't reach out for me!

Death:

Give me your hand,

you delicate child.

My hand is friendly,

not punishing.

I am not savage. Be brave!

These bony arms shall guard

your tender sleep.

Image: Hans Baldung Grien. 1518-20 Death and the Maiden. Oil on panel Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel Public domain.

SUBJECTS: Matthias Claudius, translations, Dance of Death, Grien

Let Them Play!

From Scottdale, PA in my childhood. My grandmother, Olive Trader Rutherford, tells me stories from her mother, Mary Ellen White Trader, who was a Mingo Indian. I just wrote this, in a torrent. The voice of the long-gone great-grandmother is in boldface type.

LET THEM PLAY!

by Brett Rutherford

“Mother, would you call the girls in? It will be dinner soon,”
Aunt Margie shouts from back in the kitchen.
I sit with my grandmother on the cool porch glider.
Across the street and on up the park's hill, her daughters climb
the steep sliding board and breeze down its shiny, polished curves.
Up again, downsliding, exulting the brief up-skirt blush,
legs not tiring, up again, down again, dolls put aside
in favor of the giddy height, the pull of gravity.
On a higher-up hillside, boys scale a tree, ride swing-sets
out and up almost to escape velocity. Ray guns
have replaced cap pistols, star-dreams of rockets in their heads.

My grandmother just smiles. “Oh, let them play!” she says to me.
“Another story I know, that I can tell you, aside
from the back-and-forth of the secret names of animals
(she never finished that one!) is why I say Let them play.
My mother told me true, one day in the clearing, The day
will come when you have two, three, or half a dozen children,
and you will treat each one as a new-found jewel, a pearl,
a lump of gold. Then you will want to keep each one at home,
in sight, never to leave your guarding. I say, Let them play!

Let them run in the woods. Let them chase and be chased.
Let them bite and be bitten. Let them climb up tree and rock,
wash their own little wounds in a clear, calm stream. Do not call
them until the last possible moment, till bread-crust cools
and the meat is singed black on the open fire. Let them play!

“Why, mother,” I asked, ‘should I let them run so late,
until it is so dark I can hardly see them coming? ”

It happened, she said, not here, but three villages
down creek and around the sharp-peaked mountain.
It was the time of harvest dance, a thank-you stomp to sun
and sky, just when all the trees had gone crisp and color-up,
a night when all the men would drum and dance on till midnight,
and songs would go on until it was too cold to sing
another, and the fires grew ashy and dim. With sweet fruit
and sassafras tea and honey the children and their dolls
were sent to bed, tucked in and hugged, warned that the Wendigo
must not be permitted to see them. No child was to peek.
No child was allowed to stand in pretend-dancing that night.

In their long-house beds, the children fidgeted, their blankets off,
their blankets on as they heard the drum beats, the water-drums,
the shrill flutes, the deep-voice song of the men. One, whose name was
Not-For-You-To-Know, blew into a gourd and made sounds.
The women's chant answered, high and low. They all watched,
as those shimmering stars — the Seven – what do you call them?”

“The Pleiades, grandmother?”

“Yes, the Pleiades!”

“My mother called them something else, but she showed me
their glittering up-rise from the edge of the world. She told me:

As the lonely, the desolate, the shimmering sisters crept
from the edge of the earth into the peak of the sky.
They could not harm the dancers – too far and too weak
in their sad darkness — but the children! "Ah!” she puts her hand
to her bosom and gasps, and pauses — “Mother!”
comes the call from Aunt Margie again. “Please call them in!”
Grandmother leans close to me and continues,
channeling again her own mother’s speaking:

But the children were not tired. Far from it. The song-dance twitched
in all their fingers and toes; their knees and elbows jabbed out
at one another in their beds. The straw ejected them.
They sat up They crawled unseen into the dark-on-darkness. 
In the shadow of the longhouse, no one could see them go.
And they began to dance! They danced! Up, knees! Down, feet!
The lonely spinster Pleiades, childless, saw them dancing.
They were light as feather-down, the children. They joined their hands
All their feet went up at once. A little breeze lifted them.
The Pleiades with bird-claw fingers, lonely among stars,
ah! how they wanted to have their own sons and daughters! —

“Mother! Do I have to go get them myself?
I know you’re out there. I heard the glider squeak.
I hear the two of you talking!” Aunt Margie calls, close by
from the living room, the smell of apple pie-cinnamon 
wafting out to us.

“Not quite yet, daughter,” my grandmother calls back assuringly.
“They’re right where I can see them!” I look at her expectantly. 
“And then? And then?” (Not another unfinished and interrupted tale!)

And then! she answers me. While all the elders are thanking
the sun and the moon and all the good winds, thanking the Crow
for not taking more than his share, and the Bear for forbearing 
to tear up the bark and logs of the longhouse —
a whole long, ancient list of Thanksgivings you can be sure,

The children are all trying to echo them, and just at
Crow-Thanks and Bear-Thanks, just when they hear
the elders address the Snow, that he should
not come too soon this winter nor stay on too long —
by then the Pleiades have got the children, the big ones
first, full of ten years, the not-so-big ones so full of corn
and six or seven years, even the sachem’s dear son!,
even the tiny ones whose dance was no more than a stumble 
foot-stamp. All of them up! All of them higher than cornstalks, 
higher than trees at the edge of the clearing. Fog-fingered 
and jewel-eyed childless sisters of the cold space of night —
they took them screaming into the ink-black sky. Children, gone!

That is why their village was abandoned, empty. We passed
it with sadness and shuddering along the way. We wept:
their name was soon gone at the Council Fire.

I look at her in disbelief. “I have said.” she finishes.

“Mother!” Aunt Margie shouts, her face appearing close-up
behind the porch screen-door. 

“Let them play, I say!” grandmother repeats. “Let them play
until they are so tired they drop to sleep! It is that time
of year. It is November and the night sky is lonely.”

“Those stories again!” Aunt Margie complains. Her hands go up
as though to block her ears. “Why tell your grandson those stories?”

Grandmother stands. Her tiny profile and her jet black hair
defy her tall daughter. “I have said, or memory dies.”
Soon the exhausted daughters are called inside to dinner.

[Revised at Lake Atsion NJ, April 2019)

SUBJECTS: Mingo Indians, Native American stories, Olive Rutherford, Pennsylvania, Pleiades, Seven Sisters, Scottdale.