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