The Poet Named Richard Lyman

The Poet's Press is publishing a new edition of one of the earliest productions of our press, the 1971 chapbook, In the Silence of Scorpions, by Richard Lyman. Concerning the author, whom I have elsewhere described as the most forlorn and bedraggled poet in New York, I am only able to say this:

RICHARD LYMAN (1925- 2003) was the pseudonym of Richard Bush-Brown. He was active in the Greenwich Village poetry scene in the 1960s and early 1970s. 
The poet was the son of Harold Bush-Brown (1888-1983), a Harvard-trained architect and author of the 1976 book, Beaux Arts to Bauhaus and Beyond: An Architect’s Perspective (1976). His mother, Marjorie Conant Bush-Brown (1885-1978), was an artist and portrait painter, and both his paternal grandparents were artists. He was estranged from his parents, who disapproved of his youthful avowal of Communism. Only the fact of his birth is stated on web pages about his parents.
Bush-Brown attended Black Mountain College. His poetry is overshadowed by his reverence for Dylan Thomas. His poem, “The leopard came into the world” was his most memorable work, and his readings of it impressed listeners at New York poetry readings. On the strength of this poem, The Poet’s Press persuaded Bush-Brown to assemble the manuscript for this book.
No other details are known about the poet, who vanished from the Manhattan poetry scene, and so far as we know, he published no other books. 
He continued to live in Manhattan, was seen riding the subway to and from some Wall Street job, and died on October 18, 2003. 

Here is his best poem, a dark urban vision:

The leopard came into the world 
Came at half past one and left at midnight 
Lost in the eleven-hour city 
Picked up sticks at the railroad yards 
Swished his tail in the silence of lonely rooms 
Licked the kitten against the wrinkled wall 
Finding no break for the season’s evening ripening 
Into the trough of bludgeoned seas 
Finding in the waking dark the sun 
The leopard diamond-eyed at midnight 
Found his lost remorse between the open-eyed sea 
And the rails and trolleys of the dull freight-yard 
Among the pulleys of paradise he spied 
Among beggars and the screaming police 
The whisper and the whistler of the city’s bloom 
And then in the dark he expired like a bulb 
His flesh burned out against the dying wall of slums. 

This book will be published in PDF only, and will be the 243rd production of The Poet's Press.

The Poet Who Starved (Revised)

     by Brett Rutherford, after the German of Uhland

Such was his lot — each dismal day

was short, and was marked with sorrow;

just as a poet ought, he withered

and quite forgotten, passed away.

He was an ill-starred infant

with only a muse hag for a nurse-maid,

and she it was who tutored him

to sing whether supper came or did not.

His mother, if one called some woman that,

crisped early to her untitled urn,

and so presaged his latter doom,

an anonymous and unread vessel

unfit for holding in or keeping gold.

When all around passed pewter mugs,

flagons and cups and champagne flutes,

he was the one they scorned to cheer,

pouring the dregs on cindered ground.

He knew the names of their fine vintages,

the lineage of kings who trod the valleys;

he could tell the rise and fall of empires,

but not one sip was given him!

Still, smiles returned to him each Spring,

his dreams of sweet blossoms woven,

but others hewed his trees to splinters,

boots muddying his purple stream.

When others orgied holidays, game days

and feasts, and marched in victory parades,

he raised his proud cup from afar —

his, the clear cold water; theirs, bloating beers.

The others watched him as he walked on by,

between his study and the library shelves,

thought him a pale being of scarcely flesh.

“He must have inherited money.

“An other-worldly man, almost a ghost.

He doesn't live like us. Ambrosia, mead,

strange fruits and berries, and a millet stew,

must be his monkish provender.”

Dead! dead! they found him sitting there

over the crumbs of one last saltine, pot

of a weak tea too many times infused

until it was merely shaded water.

There was nothing in his house! Just papers piled!

Cupboards zig-zaggedy with spiderwebs,

ice-box unplugged, a gasless stove,

plates in the sink, oh, too far gone for mould!

Easy it was to carry him, pine box

weighing no more than pine box and a suit

of grave-clothes. No hearse for him: a handcart

sufficed to trundle him off to the graveyard.

His tread had scarcely marked the dust

when he walked of nights. May the earth

rest light on his shoulders. May someone find

those papers he left, and publish them.

May someone remember those words were his.

[Written February 2019, revised May 2019].

The Doll Without A Face (Revised)

 

by Brett Rutherford


Who is it who can tell me who I am? — King Lear


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. Then she placed before me
a bag, soft, suede, as tan as the oak leaves
that still clung rabidly to trees outside.

It was tied with a leather cord, cram-full
of objects that tumbled out. Small things first:
shiny white shells, water-worn bright 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, so good for arrows,” she said.
“That’s how my mother explained it.” She traced
the edge along her cheek. I shuddered then,
“Be careful! 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
’til they are old, and writing, far away.”

She reached into the bag, removed a doll,
an almost weightless thing of dried-out corn-husks.
It had a dress, blue-printed calico,
delicate red shoes, a beaded hat, braids
made of twisted corn-silk, blond white. Round 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 pause for that to sink in.
“Things that my mother’s mother left to her.
The family called themselves the Whites. Took her
in, a young girl, Indian braids and all.
No one was who they said they were: Stouffel
White was Christoph Weiss in Germany.
Henry White, the son whose big farm it was,
he spoke English, German when he had to.
Lots of children, hands to work and pray with,
one more was easy to take in. A lot
of Mingos from here were going West,
Senecas too, driven from New York state.
Many who could pass, already had names
from husbands and fathers and from Bibles,
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 back to us.
I never called her anything but ‘Ma”;
she was ‘Mrs. Trader’ to the neighbors.
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 say the good White name was really Weiss.
But then she just told everyone: not White,
not Weiss, she was 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 then
a thing of shame became a thing of 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 pick it up,
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 gone 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, and I worked hard.
Kept to myself and sang my own music.
When done with chores, and there were plenty,
I roamed in 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 me 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 bright 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 in, 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 those agates
that looked like sunset paintings done on stone.

Up and down and across three states she went.
The old trails ran north-south and west-to-east:
Salt Lick Path to Braddock’s Camp; Braddock’s Road
white-written over Nemacolin’s Path.
She knew her way, scavenged and traded,
did God-knows-what to visit me each June.
Strawberry-time, 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 their 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, just might, have been my mother’s eyes.
I didn’t turn to look. Girl-chatter blocked
the call of the day-time whippoorwill, 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 this 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.”


[Revised May 2019]

Anniversarius 44: At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit 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 die,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag. They are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of all identity,
chopped to mulch for next year’s gardens.

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

                                 While all this leaf-holocaust,
this flee-to-south abandonment
by nations of bird flocks goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps every lone cornstalk
and the dried-out irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?

Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through the tree-bared acres at the line
of dark and leaden pines, black silhouettes
bold in the slanting dusk. A warning take
from the wind’s disconsolate sigh; no hope
can they gain from the coming election.

Death weaves through the browning, rigid cat-tails.
Brittle they lean, seed-shorn and childless now
that the swamp has been drained; their realm will end
at a gravel barricade, a concrete wall
no seed can scale, nor root circumference.

The blasted oak tree wears its own dead leaves,
a bearded miser, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers wait,
silent steel mastodons at glacier’s edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.

You and I are not part of them. A third
of the poor insects are already gone.)

From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kommenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.

I go to the graveyard’s shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,

tree-fathers as old as any tombstone here.
A few yellow leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a sly dust-devil.

They will return with me to join

my curiosity cabinet

of well-preserved loves, and gelled high moments.

Autumn is not and never will be

an ending. Autumn piled up on itself

is a bottomless leaf-pile. Oh, plunge in!

Stand here still hearing the dying bell-tone,

as a 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 to the 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

The Bubble (Revised)

by Brett Rutherford

We rule an earth that is but microns thin,
you and I — we ride on our separate
hemispheres in a yinyang never-catch
pursuit — love in an endless chase of fear,
spinning and tiding a fevered planet. 
A sleepless Titan, Kronos, grows within
grinds forehead and nostrils against the pane
of the mind’s mantle’s, world’s cool underside:
this shadow of a shadow shouts its name. 
It thinks it is God, faith-fanged, it slobbers
souls’ marching orders, taboos and bans.

The reason’d Sphere is hard —­ a perfect tomb
for fiends, inquisitors, and catechists —
but now our bubble planet breaks apart
in demon tentacle arm-and-leg flex,
and simple Truth is lost to air.
I love in vain. You flee in terror’s thrall.
Gnarled old Kronos is loose in the world.

The Titan Thing, unchained, must have its lust
and, wrenching out its adamantine bars,
throws lovers aside, knocks thrones to rubble,
grinds genius back to idiot dust motes.
Its vacant eye usurps the dying stars.

I go to a place of black-hole exile.
There is not room enough for you and me
in bed with that rampaging deity.

God-love destroyed our love. God-love destroys 
everything, a desolated cosmos.
So let us be both love and god
in one another’s worshiping.
Let us set up stock in Things As They Are
and sit beneath our own self-planted trees,
content in hand-grasps till every demon dies.

[Written circa 1967, revised and expanded 2018, revised and expanded again in May 2019.]