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.
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]
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