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!”