When the Vampire Is King

by Brett Rutherford

There are immortal beings, but they are all evil.
Whereas we live on the substance of life, eating
the root and flesh of creatures, they live
on life itself, the force and essence of being.

One of their kind has come to me, and fed.
Before each dawn he will have come and gone again,
again and forever until my last breathing.
It is a slow death he brings; he is barely
existent, paper-thin. He will be at it for months,
pin-prick and red-dot scab so quickly gone,
I barely notice. He grows more solid each night.

My friends are little help. They are being finished off.
The vampire's minions have formed a gang: red-
hatted criminals in sports attire and fast cars.
Each victim is reduced to just a pile of bones,
so that I will be left alone for his stalking.
He turns the corner — I dash inside a doorway,
an empty apartment or untenanted warehouse.
The moment I reach its back-door egress, I find
him standing there, pale as an opossum.
He wags his finger in admonition: no exit
exists except I will find him already there.

On the dread night of the Winter Solstice I die,
and on the next morn he will assume a human form —
my youthful twin, solid and mirror-bright.
He will live out the life he stole from me.
His henchmen will be no encumbrance to his plan:
having devoured everyone I know, to the bone,
they will turn cannibal and consume each other.
Only my evil twin will be inheritor
of the desolate carnage of my existence.

On the dread night of the Winter Solstice I die,
unless there be other immortals who hate
that crisped, crawling parasite enough
to rise from Tartarus to put him down.
Where is the hell-mouth, then? How to descend
into the darkness where evil hates itself
enough to foment a war of monsters
against a great and ancient foe? Old books I seek,
the magic alchemical lore of my childhood,
a gateway talisman, the key that Solomon
and Dee and the other necromancers passed on.
The stone Eleggua winks at me as I incant,
Opener of Doorways, lead the way! Hecate,
scorn not the call of one who is not a woman!
Ye Hundred-Handed slayers, lend me but one hand!

I am not lamb, I am not sacrificial ox.
A vampire should be no more than a mosquito
to my larger and more expansive new self.
I shall return from the onyx night of Hell
with bat-bane and wolf-bane and Gorgon shield,
and with the one sword that will open him
and free a thousand souls' life-force into the cosmos.

Vampire, stalk not a sorcerer!

Rev 5/2/2019
[The first draft, written in one pass upon awaking from a dream, had some irregular lines. The revisions cast this into a mixture of blank verse and 12-syllable lines.]

The Sarah Helen Whitman Book is Now Available

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe’s posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916. As critic, she was a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson, yet none of her literary essays other than her defense of Poe have ever appeared in book form. She and her friend Margaret Fuller are credited with being the first American women literary critics.This volume presents Whitman’s literary essays with more than 500 annotations and notes, tracing her literary sources and allusions, and revealing the remarkable breadth of her readings in literature, philosophy, history, and science. Brett Rutherford’s biographical essay is rich in revelations about Whitman’s time and place, her family history, and her muted career as poet, essayist, and den mother to artists and writers. Exploding the standard view of her as the secluded “literary widow,” we can now perceive her as a literary radical pushing against a conservative milieu; a suffragist and abolitionist who dabbled in séances; and a devotee of the New England Transcendentalists and the German Idealists who inspired them.The complete text of Edgar Poe and His Critics presented here, includes the opposing texts by Rufus Griswold, whose libels provoked her landmark defense of Poe’s writing and character. This annotated version identifies all the contemporary press reviews and books Whitman read and critiqued, making it indispensible for students of Edgar Allan Poe.The selected poems in this volume include the hyper-Romantic traversal of rival mythologies in “Hours of Life,” her most ambitious work; her poems to and about Edgar Allan Poe; sensitive and atmospheric nature portrayals; a defense of the then-reviled art of the drama; a love poem from Proserpine to Pluto; an occasional poem about Rhode Island penned in the after-shadow of the Dorr Rebellion; and translations from French and German poets, most notably the most famous of all European ghost ballads, Bürger’s “Leonora.” Whitman’s allusions and unattributed quotations from other poets are all annotated, making this book a must for scholars and students.

Susanna Rich's Book Now Available

Susanna Rich's Beware the House book-ends a wide-ranging collection of life story-poems between two Gothic, haunted houses, the first a surreal nightmare; the second, the mock-Gothic harpsichord-punctuated world of TV’s The Addams Family. Unease, discomfort, and pain belong between two haunted places (confused birth and sardonic death), and Rich shares deeply personal accounts of her Hungarian-immigrant grandmother, obsessed in old age with Franz Liszt as an imaginary lover; and a disintegrating mother in the throes of dementia. At the center of the book are poems like glass shards of modern living, a keen and concise language palette turning the everyday into the extraordinary. Like a gypsy dance, these poems careen off common experiences — the grandmother’s kitchen, the captive butterfly, a rebellion of trees, the driven car and the rubbernecked accident. And there are villains: the predatory boor repulsed, the unteachable student lesson-taught, the empty soul of the CEO laid bare, the bad president as piñata, the lecherous poetry professor, the restless Dybbuk.

At First Sight

When people who read too many books are smitten, this is what you get.

AT FIRST SIGHT

by Brett Rutherford

You are my Ring of Power,
The hurled strength of Thor's hammer,
The Chalice, Excalibur,
Swan-Knight, archangel bright,
Siegfried awash in the Magic Fire,
Tristan, The Green Man,
The last Mohican at the wood's edge,
Golden-fleeced Jason, Perseus fleet
winged down with blade and polished shield.

And as for me, I am just a poet,

the sum of all the dreamers' words I read
and marked as my rude guide and talismen.
I was called Edmond Dantès once,
betrayed alike by friend and lover
until I became rich and vengeful.
I was Nemo at the helm of The Nautilus,
unperturbed by personal passions,
implacable enemy of unjust nations.
I was stern Morbius on far Altair
weighing the wisdom of the ancient Krell,
withholding love for the more-than-human.
Paul Verlaine was I once — three times
I regarded the young Rimbaud
through the clouded cafe window
and I walked away and returned
and I walked away and returned
before I dared introduce myself.
Forlorn I walked to a London's dawning,
fortune and reputation spent,
betrayed by Bosie, to my prison cell.
With mates I wept for slain Sarpedon,
and on the other side of the battle,
beat my shield for Achaean Patroklus.
These hands for Emperor Hadrian carved
the first immortal marble Antinous.
I despaired of all love at the organ
I played beneath the Paris Opera.

I was the avatar of solitude.

Why does it shatter now in a breath,

one head-to-toe embrace reducing me
to volt, amp, and constituent atoms?

You are my Ring of Power,

The hurled strength of Thor's hammer,
The Chalice, Excalibur,
Swan-Knight, archangel bright.
Siegfried awash in Magic Fire,
Tristan, The Green Man,
The last Mohican at the wood's edge,
Golden-fleeced Jason, Perseus fleet
winged down with blade and polished shield.

April 3, 2019, rev May 2, 2019