The Sorcerer's Complaint

by Brett Rutherford


for Barbara Holland

There is no use deceiving her.

Her hooded eyes, in shadow, see

each shade and its dim penumbra.

Drinking lapsang souchong

tea at my Sixth Avenue loft,

she spies the nightshade, the wolfbane,

purpling the herbal window sill.

At pre-dawn hour when all others slumber,

she skulks by, just when my illegal pet

happens to dangle a tangible limb

out and then down the fire escape, three floors.

No one was meant to see that tentacle

as it lowered trash to the waiting can!

When she joins in my poetry circle,

my Siamese cat athwart her lap-book,

her balletic toe lifts up the carpet,

revealing last night’s chalked-in Pentagram.

“Really!” she chides. “Demons don’t answer calls

that easily, and I should know.”

From sidewalk she called, “Are you on fire, or what?”

that night my more musty conjurations

failed to clear the chimney top and gasped

out every window of my loft.

“Nothing to see!” I shouted down at her,

“A meatloaf did not survive the oven!”

Somehow one shard of carbon-clot

detached and followed her, and stayed —

I let it, to punish her being so much

in the way of learning my business.

Yet she is obstinate. My tea and talk

are just too much to her liking, so back

she comes, her raccoon-collar coat turned up

against the cloud that hovers there,

on my command. Week after week,

that black and personal drizzle hounds

her Monday walks through Chelsea streets.

Umbrellas are of no avail;
they leak into her mouse-brown hair.
Wind blows the rain sideways at her

as she hurls herself among
bus shelters and doorway awnings.

There is no waiting out the storm.

The manual of sorcery explains:

it is easier to start bad weather,

than to stop it.

[Revised May 2019].

(c 1972, new version Nov 2018)

The Doll With No Face

By Brett Rutherford

One tea-and-cookies Sunday, she had more time
to spend with me, the youngest son's first child.
As I sat, lap full of Classic Comics,
grandmother Rutherford rummaged away
in the unseen kitchen. "Where? Where?" she asked.
Wood drawers slid. Cabinets squeaked open.
"Ah! Don't slip away — I found it again."

She cleared the tea table. "More, please!" I asked,
and held the tea cup out. She poured, I poised
the full teacup and watched the pot vanish
onto a sideboard. She put a bag before me,
soft, suede, brown the color of the oak leaves
that still clung rabidly to the trees outside.

It was tied with a leather cord, cram-full
of objects that tumbled out. Small things first:|
shiny white shells, water-worn colored agates,
black arrowheads, a bronze scrap verdigris'd,
a miscellany of seeds and pods, dried
leaves and petals long past the hint of hue.

"It's like my rock collection!" I offered.
"Agates like that I get from Jacob's Creek."
She pushes that one aside, holds the black
arrowhead in the palm of her hand, "Sharp-
edged black glass, good for arrows," she said.
"That's how my mother explained it." She ran
the edge along her cheek. I shuddered then,
and told her "Obsidian! Volcanic
glass. I find it in the road-fill. Aztecs
used it to cut out hearts. Sharp as a saw
a surgeon's saw." — "You know too much for ten.
Your teachers don't understand you, I hear.
That's why I can say things no one should know
until they're old, and far away, remembering."

She reached into the bag, removed the doll,
an almost weightless thing of cornhusks.
It had a dress, blue-printed calico,
delicate red shoes, a beaded hat, braids
made of corn-silk, blond white. Its rounded head
was pulled tight with cloth, but hard as a stone —
no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth, no name
one could call it, or any name one wished.

"Boy: these are the things my mother left me."
She left a long silence for that to sink in.
"Things that my mother's mother left to her."

"The family called themselves White. Took her
in, a young girl, Indian braids and all.
No one was what they said they were: Stouffel
White was Christopher Weiss in Germany.
Henry White, the son whose big farm it was,
had many children, hands to work and pray.
One more was easy to take in. A lot
of Mingos and Senecas were going West,
driven from New York State, driven from here.
Many who could pass, they just took white names
and settled out in the hills and hollows.
Some had their children taken out to school,
some women married whites who didn't want
an Indian man's children, so gave them up."

She went to the sideboard, a drawer pulled.
"Here" — a stern old woman in widow's black —
"is how she looked when she came to live with us.
I never called her anything but 'Ma",
or 'Mrs. Trader' to the neighborhood.
Ten years they had lived in Allegheny,
across the river from Pittsburgh, chairman
of some company board he was — died there
and she came on home. None of us did church
except for Christmas, and neither did she.

"You didn't talk about being a Mingo.
It was bad enough when the first war came
to never say the White name came from Weiss.
But then she just told everyone: not White,
not Weiss, she was an Indian, plain and true.
We laughed. She tried to change her clothing then,
bought beads and buttons and Indian scarves.
My husband was furious. Our children
were called names and ridiculed, but instead
of a thing of shame it became a pride.

"One day she sat on the front porch with me.
She had this brown bag and the things in it.
'Sharp-edged black glass — this is good for arrows,'
she told me, as one by one she brought out
the rocks, the shells, the copper shard, this flint
she said came all the way from Michigan.
This from our fathers' fathers, a bone thing
from a raccoon's private parts, and magic.
She had a name for each thing, and a place,
all in her mish-mash Mingo-Delaware.

"Then came this doll, this doll without a face.
I never saw her cry but once, and this
was it. She didn't let me play with it,
just held it on her lap and said, 'Listen.
Remember. My mother gave me this doll
the day she left me at the White farmhouse.
She'd be away a while she said, and I
must look at her face, then at the doll's face,
then at her face and at the doll's again,
till when I saw its emptiness I saw
her grieved face, her deep black eyes,
     her forced smile.
Just keep the doll with you till I return.

'The Whites were kind, but I worked hard,
Kept to myself and sang my own music,
played in the woods with the named animals
I knew from my mother's teachings. Three girls
I played with, not quite as sisters. They scorned
my poor clothing, my stubborn braids. Ma White
took all my clothes one night and gave a hand-
me down dress and underclothes and new shoes.
I was less an outcast now. No Sunday
Church for me, but we would play with our dolls.
Their dolls had porcelain faces, with eyes
and noses and ruby lips and blushes.

'My doll — it had only my mother's face
that only I could see, and I just smiled
as happy with my little one, as they
with theirs. Summers I'd play apart, out past
the last corn-rows where the deep woods began.
Mrs White called me but I wouldn't come.
I waited— one day each summer — she'd come.
A whippoorwill call in daytime, she'd come —
there'd be no embrace so wondrous, no eyes
so deep and dark and arrowed with sad tears,
nothing I wouldn't labor through so long
as she came with basket and moccasins,
dried fruit and candied ginger, a handful
of found rocks and feathers and agates
that looked like sunset paintings done on stone.

'Up and down and across three states she went.
Trails ran north-south and west-to-east:
Salt Lick Path to Braddock's Camp; Braddock's Road
white-written over what had been Nemacolin's Path.
She knew her way, and scavenged and traded,
did God-knows-what to get to see me each June.
When strawberries came, I knew she'd be there
calling at the wood's edge for her daughter.

'Three years it went that way. I grew. Sisters
and cousins of the Whites tormented me
for my strange ways, weird songs, and for the doll
that had no face. At night they'd turn it round
so that it wouldn't face the other dolls.
They said it gave their dolls bad dreams. I hid
it beneath my pillow, then in a box
where I feared it would suffocate. Ma White —
I could call her 'Ma' as long as the 'White'
was attached to it like an apology —
came back from town one day with a present.
A doll it was, a newer, cleaner, bright
of eye, five-fingered, five-toed, black-haired and
silver-shoed princess. She'd put to shame the dolls
my sisters had nearly wrecked with playing.

'Soon I prevailed at a porch tea party,
where my doll, Abigail, now reigned supreme.
White sisters scowled, knowing no comeuppance
could come their way before the Christmas tree
restocked the dolls with the latest fashions.
My doll was lecturing her inferiors
on the new rules of the White doll order
when, from my corner of my eye, I saw,
between two cautiously-parted branches
what might have been my mother's eyes.

'I didn't turn to look. Girl-chatter blocked
the call of the day-time whipporwill, once.
Maybe twice I heard it, but didn't go
to the wood's edge where I always met her.
Then she was there, in full sight, eyes all wide
in a wordless 'See me, daughter' greeting.
And then. O my daughter, and then,
ashamed that my sisters might glimpse her,
sun-burnt and moccasin'd with her traders'
basket and pack — I turned back to my doll
and — I — pretended —not — to — see — her.'

"This is how my mother lost her mother.
She never saw her again. In bag
she hid away the doll, the arrowheads,
stones, feathers, dried blossoms and raccoon bones.
No longer could she see her mother's face
on the wrapped rock that was the corn-doll's head.

"She hid who she was, until the time of remembering."

Photo: Portrait of Mary White Trader.

At the Grave of Homer

by Brett Rutherford

On Ios the itchy-haired boys,
picking at head-lice like monkeys,
hectored to death the dotard Homer
as he stumbled sea-ward, hands up
to catch sun's east-west wandering,
ears to the waves to ken the echoes
and tides that guided him daily
from arbor to sea-park and home
again. "Old Man," they taunted,
"You know the gods. What color
is the hair of Aphrodite? How tall
was Aias when he stood in armor?"

Calmly, he answered them: "Bright
as spun gold. Tall as a ten-year oak."

I Dreamt I Was Dante

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
as on my ankles, but these feet are numb,
the bony knobs and claws of an exile.
My limbs are brown and scourged
with years. An umber moon,
senile amid the drooling clouds, tilts
earthward and winks at me,
the knowing eye of eternity,
changeless and blistering.

A cypress grove, its rippled leaves
cat-furring the rigid columns of sky-
supporting trunks, the blue drear tears
of trees unbearable in daylight: how cool
they are, how wise reflecting in dew-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
formed by the slab-walls of quarry stone,
blocks of an unfinished temple to gods
the fall of an empire extinguished,
now a limestone catacomb roofed by a vault
of stars. The maze invites my errant feet
to tread its ever-regressive avenues.

At the far heart of the stone-cypress maze
in a niche cut out of purest marble,
on a pediment of onyx, Beatrice waits.
She is already dead, and I will die
before I can ever find her resting place.
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.

First H.P. Lovecraft Waterfire, Providence

by Brett Rutherford

It was in his honor, really. The band,
by god, was actually from Yuggoth.
Upon the bright stage at Steeple Street, two
rugose cones were induced to shimmy-dance
as cowled Keziah looked on approvingly.
Most of the audience, unwashed
or overly manicured, jeaned or dolled-
up for later dates at the hookah-bar,
were quite oblivious to what or whom
the puppet orchestra gave its homage.

This was H.P. Lovecraft’s first Waterfire,
art-sound-and-puppet spectacle amid
a river lit by flaming wood braziers,
as the hooded and torched participants
chanted a well-rehearsed chant to the Elder Gods,
seventy-two strong. Could Howard, misanthrope,
have ever imagined the echoing call
from bank and office tower, of words like
“Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Yog-Sothoth!”

or that a truck-size Cthulhu would barge up
the Providence River to the waiting cove?

One outraged preacher confronted the crowd:
“I rebuke you! I rebuke all of you
in the name of Jesus Christ!” And the band
played on, and the chanters chanted on,
and the stars sped on in their cold orbits,
and perhaps two lips, that smiled too seldom
curled up and inward to a skull-teethed grin
somewhere in a grave along the Seekonk.

I tried to be a celebrant, really,
but repellent hordes of ordinaries
made walking on unthinkable. Mothers
with babies. Multiple babies. Twin prams
the size of original Volkswagens
prevented my passage on the narrow,

cobbled walk. I tried. A great hound snarled, lunged,
and then, like the tricephalic hellhound
Cerberus, an apparition with three
leashed mastiffs confronted me. Then I whirled
into a noxious cloud of cigar smoke,
a toxic cloud and a man within it,
who would not let me pass. Backwards, sideways
I stepped then, as two autistic children,
one wrestled to fidgeting by his father,
the other hurling across the sidewalk,
thrust flailing limbs into my rib-cage.

I climbed a grassy slope to elude them,
looked down from afar. Most natives looked like
an undulation of stumbling spheres clad
in motley of random, unwashed laundry.

Then I came eye to eye with three young men,
(three dozen tattoos at least among them)
watching from the bed of a pickup truck,
smelling of gun oil, vomit and whiskey.
Binoculared, they eyed the Waterfire,
the celebratory burning braziers,
the fire-attendants’ barge, the silent passing
of real and faux Venetian gondolas.

Have these men have ever heard of Lovecraft?

“Saw a boat with an octopus,” one said.
“Yeah. Just flatboats with oars. The damn water
is only three feet deep ’less the tide’s up.”
“So jus’ where the hell is the Hovercraft?”
the man with binoculars demanded.
“They said there was gonna be Hovercraft!”