Imaginary Playmate

by Brett Rutherford

It was my secret place
away from bath-time and spanking,
away from Grandfather’s grizzled hugs,
from the cries of the baby brother,
away from heat and brambles,
blackberry barb and poison ivy —
a cool-air haven
where the acrid fumes
of coke-oven smoke
never intruded:
the “spring-house,”
a covered well, actually,
a cobwebbed shed
of cool-sweated pump and pipes.

Here I could sit
behind its plank door,
imagining another door,
flat on the concrete,
that opened downward
to a treasure cave,
a city of runaways,
a subterranean launch-pad
for moon rockets.

One day a man was there,
crouching inside
beneath a straw hat,
a shoulder pack,
more frightened of me,
it seemed, than I of him.

I sat beside him
on the cold stone lip
of the gurgling well.
His whispered words
were barely louder
than the distant coal trucks,
the chirring cicadas.
His name was Eric, 

a young man, yet
bigger than my father.
He asked about my mother,
my teacher, the friends
I would see again
in second grade in the fall.
“Too bad your mother is married,”
he said. “She’s pretty.
I watched her from the road.”

Two weeks he hid there,
sleeping all morning.
I brought him cookies.
He taught me games.
Once, I touched
the soft blond beard
that glazed his cheekbones.
I could tell him anything.

Soap opera organ
rose to a frenzy
on the oval-windowed
new television
as someone yelled:
“Kidnapped!
Our son has been kidnapped!”

What’s kidnap? I ask my mother.
She, ironing, from the other room:
That’s when they steal a child
and then ask for money.

I thought it might be fun
to be kidnapped.
I might even get to keep
some of the money.

Just watch out for strange cars,
my mother warned.

One day I mentioned Eric
at the dinner table.
“That’s all he talks about,”
my mother explained.
“That’s his friend,
his imaginary playmate.”
My father grew angry.
They shouted
as I read comics in my bedroom.

One day, my father took me
to a roadside tavern.
He sat in the back
with his band leader,
played an illegal
slot machine.
They worked on “Stardust”
together, his clarinet
and Tony’s trumpet.

A strange man came in,
saw me alone,
gave me a nickel
to buy potato chips.

As my father returned,
I asked my new friend,
“Can I have another nickel?”
My father exploded,
shouted at the stranger:
“No one gives my kid money!”

The stranger left hurriedly.

Why did he go? Strangers seemed

kinder to me than parents.
I thought about kidnapped children,
sweets and sodas everywhere,
fresh bread from the oven,
mountains of comic books,

a long wait for the ransom,
maybe never.

At home, the spring-house was locked.
My mother doled out dinner:
government surplus beef
and slices of cheese
off a long square loaf.
Some nights we ate bread
and gravy and radishes.

I stayed indoors all summer.
Sometimes at night
I thought I saw someone
cross from the poplars,
to the spring-house, then back again,
a lanky form darting
from shadow to shadow.

I sleepwalked many nights,
awaking against the locked
front door. On other nights
I dreamt my own door
at the back of the closet.
I opened it, to another door,
and yet another, until sleep
vacuumed me to darkness.

I never mentioned Eric again.

Years later I heard
of the men who slept
in the nearby foothills,
setting up camp
in the abandoned ovens —
draft dodgers avoiding
the Korean War call-up.

Years after that I suddenly
remembered him again —
his soft tenor voice in the shadow,
the friend to whom I said,

“Would you kidnap me someday?
I’ll never tell . . . I promise.”

The Old Brick House at Carpentertown

by Brett Rutherford

Only a few memories define it
now that it is gone, gone
to the last brick, a place
where two roads meet
in a bramble of scrub trees
and blackberries wild:

Never turn on the lights
in the dining room:
if you flick the switch
you smell smoke
and hear a crackling sound
somewhere behind
the peeling wallpaper.

Never go down those steps
to the cellar. The rats
are there, and they own it.

Tap water is only
for taking a bath.
It is not safe to drink;
the well is poisoned
by the slow seep
of wet ash-piles
from the glowing coke-ovens.

Never go up
to the slanted attic whose one
sole window throws light
one hour a day
on the head and shoulders
of a nameless Greek.

Do not eat the dog's
worm medicine,
even if it looks like
M&Ms.

Never tell anyone
you have learned to levitate
and do not need to touch
foot to stair-tread
coming down from your bedroom.

Never tell anyone
ever again
about your imaginary
playmate. Just lie
and say you were alone.
Both voices were yours.
Smile mysteriously.

When, late at night,
you press your face
to a window pane
and an escaped blank panther,
paws on the window-sill,
regards you eye-to-eye,
tell no one.

When a great storm
comes, run to the porch
to feel the rain-lash
against your face.
Welcome the lightning.
Imagine yourself as one
of the Lombardy poplars
aching for a thunderbolt.

Carry its many rooms
inside you forever,
haunter of your own
haunted house.

The Winner

by Brett Rutherford

Damn if he didn't beat the odds!

John won the lottery.
He spent all night
listing the things he'd do
as soon as the cash
filled his house to the rafters.

Running downtown
to find a lawyer,
crosswalk-waiting
at Fifth and Smithfield

(not taking any chances
with his hundreds
of millions!)

he was struck
by a falling meteorite,
a fireball so hot
he was sublimed
to a dirt-brown cloud
that instantly dispersed.

Crowds edged
the sinkhole crater,
wondering who …

--   

The Times That Burn the Brain

by Brett Rutherford

(I hid a few rhyming poems in The Pumpkined Heart. This was one of them.)

The times that burn the brain are few:
when art commands that love be shed;
when you last expect to see the dead,
now truly gone, come into view;

when abstract thoughts become mere breath
upon the tongue, and Liberty
lies down with chains and musketry;
when you admit that gainless death

burns thousands from a tyrant brain
and murder stains your nation’s face,
as one by one the storms erase
all freedoms in a bloody rain;

to climb a hill before the dawn
and find your heart’s last village lost
into the concrete void of time,
to know the past is now beyond
your step, yourself a wordy ghost,
unchanging, in a rhyme.


1973, rev. 2019.

A Wing of Time (2019 version)

by Brett Rutherford

This little "Twilight Zone" episode narrative poem has me going back in time in 1973, revisiting the college town where I lived from 1965 to 1969. Ironic now that I felt "so much older."

This village street will always split me —
     half in the gray-fringed present,
     half quarked away in time
from dull today to that brilliant
     yesterday — a day I am not yet
     twenty and the maples seem shorter,
          the houses whiter, the sky
a bluer blue through eyes unclouded.

I stand before a dingy storefront.
Back then it was a dress shop
     with but a single mannequin.
Next to it was Gorman’s
     steamy laundromat
churning students’ underwear and towels,
a nickel-dime-quarter juggernaut
devouring stray socks, a treasuryof  lint and buttons.

Above the laundry, beyond that rotting
window-frame, was my first apartment.
Was it fifteen dollars a month I paid
for two converted office rooms,
     a hallway bathroom and shower?
Are those the same curtains still,
tattered and colorless as I found them
and left them? The same glass,
certainly, through which I watched
the leaf-fall, lightning, snowstorm,
the neon light of the Hotel Bar
(no one under twenty-one admitted!)

I see the pale green painted wall
not changed in grudging landlord years.
I climb the narrow stairs, pass down
the beer-corroded corridor to my door,
whose frosted glass was once gold-leafed
with some insurance agent’s name.

Do I do this? Are my hand, nervous,
solid enough to knock, or am I dreaming?
My tap on the glass is solid enough.
A thin blond woman answers, puzzled.
I tell her I lived her as a student,
     oh, many years ago.
Could I just stand here a moment,
look out her window at the village green? —

where someone, in unintended irony,
has placed the town’s own name
in giant wooden letters,
     as though the inhabitants
     needed to be reminded,
the traveler admonished.
Sinners, this is Edinboro!
Fathers, guard your daughters!

A wave of heat rolls through the trees outside.
Were it a wing of Time, whose darker side
enfolds the past, what memories appear?
I see the vanished store whose wooden frame
extends into the square, a blur of green
as sycamores sawed down or thunderstruck
burst back to view. A sigh of life unfurls,
the lake regains its water lily bloom,
long-dead sparrows rebuild forgotten nests,
and on the street, departed friends go by —


Squat Bertha goes to get her mail. Next door,
her restaurant slides to bankruptcy,
unpaid employees and a sheriff’s sale.
I heard her scold her harried waitresses
for wasting moldy pie. Do it like this! —
she flipped the pie-slice over deftly
then scraped a knife across the furry crust,
flipping it back to who would ever know —
now serve it with a smile! Above her store, 
she had her quart of beer, remembering
the brothel she ran in her Erie days.
The men in her rooms are boarders, students.
Deans and professors eat at her table.
Head high, she’s almost respectable now.

I see four shadows in the alleyway —
three high school boys and a slow-minded girl.
She goes there often. They catch her there,
against the wall their prying hands adept
at raising her skirt, stealing quick pleasure.
After the shadows mingle, pressed on brick,
sneakered feet scatter in every direction.  

Outside the bar, the college boys loitering
swoon as Jamie and her sketchpad pass them.
Her tied-back hair jet black, her almond eyes
Eurasian orbs of challenge and surrender.
Her breasts move through their dreams 
          like wrecking cranes.
Her siren silhouette, voice-song, Muse-call,
perfect things, untouchably sufficient.
It was enough that she existed here.

Now others pass: a student prince who died
in megalo-brainfire tumor madness;
the tragic bronchial artist coughing,
imagining consumption’s early death;
one, two, a half dozen for Vietnam,
whose jungles would cripple them, or kill them
(one whose body was never found, looks up
as though his ghost and my vision had locked);

my best friends, the mad and sad ones, strolling
on by as though I still awaited them —
the best of their time, the dreamer drop-outs,
acid, depression, poverty and war
cutting its swath through my generation.
In this interval a hundred have passed,
known and unknown, the loved and the yearned-for,
all of them still before their beginnings,
not drinking the poison of compromise,
not marrying lies, denying visions,
not using youth to engender monsters.
They do not see my future looking down,
not one of them seems coarse or mediocre.

And there, impossibly, I see myself,
a younger form, approach.
He is by all standards, pretty much
     out of his mind.
His eyes are wide with poems.
He turns and looks back at passers-by
if they happened to have beautiful eyes.
He is carrying a batch
     of his underground newspaper
     giving them out     
          to everyone he recognizes.
He enters through the door below,
his footsteps sure upon the stair.
I turn, I dash into the darkened hall.
I hide in the bathroom until he passes,
then tread my way silently
to the street, and to the present..

He only cares about the future.
I wish I could warn him.
I think he was very foolish
    to linger here,
as I was foolish to return.

Yet this is what I learned:
I always thought others the meteors,
racing on by, too hot to touch,
never quite seen or palpable.
I thought the world a-spin
away and beneath my grasp,
yet here it sits, slow in its orbit
as a banana slug.
And now I understand:
I was the meteor. I am the meteor.
I blaze through. Nothing remains
of me but these etched words.

Hither and Yon

by Brett Rutherford

There is one who loves me,

     three towns hither,
and there is one I love,
     just three towns yon.

Yet over all of us one hand

has painted the same starry vault
that rotates just the same;

the trees have turned the same

resplendent gold,
     but the veined and crispèd leaves
     are not the same here
     as they are hither and yon.
The same moon goes new to gibbous
    here, and then full to gibbous again
     until there is no moon above us,

dark here, dark hither, dark yon.

Not one of us can reach out to touch
from our closed rooms the same dawn.

We will shiver a common winter.
We will sleep singly, or not at all,
wasting with pent-up longing.

In sad fact, not one of us
shall ever see the other again.

1973, rev. 2019

The Daemon Leads Me On

by Brett Rutherford

Greece, when thy fleet-footed Hermes graced
my adolescence with the poet’s tongue,
when eyes conceived of impossible art
and the sightless, deaf and immutable
logic of words first sprung to my grasp;
even when music burst upon me —
in all that beauteous conception
no word or chord attained this pitch
where now I lie.

Earth, now that your dew-time’s herald larks
have urged the hesitant spring of the sun,
I wake to hold one, new to my arms
as our restless and irrefutable
tokens of lips, caresses and sighs
carry us over the cavernous edge
of frozen sea.

Thanos, when thy hungry gravebed takes
my poems, and this human eye
grows black with dreaming and weeping
     for art,
and a carpet of green and spurious twigs
drains my old cells in bloodless symmetry,
will this love be coin enough for the boatman?
will whom I loved suffice to keep my name
and poems read?

Hermes has been my guide.
I know nothing of grace or immortality.
The god of sudden inspiration
is my daemon, and I must pay him
by being buffeted this way, that way,
one step ahead of the landlord,
at odds with order and decency until I am 
of words bereft.

(This trifle existed in an almost inarticulate version in my 1973 book, The Pumpkined Heart. It makes a little more sense in this version.)

1796 Edinboro Lake

by Brett Rutherford

Off the Venango path and north
of the place called Cussewago, they found  (1)
the uninhabited lake. What did it look like then?
Crammed to its edge with ancient trees
a woods in perpetual dusk where one
could walk for three days before
another cabin smoked out in a clearing.
Here and there along the way
some rotted, roofless ruin lay
where an Erie long-house had been,
or a mound mysterious full of arrow-heads,
a place whose people had vanished,
driven by the Canada’s enraged Hurons
into extinction. No more Eries, no more
this lake a place of winter refuge.
It was empty, and waiting.

So why not claim it? Why not this lake,
so like the lochs of Scotland, why not
this man, John Culberston, Scot-born
but free? From Philadelphia west
he had come; he had weathered out
that Britain-versus-America problem
and it was time to put down roots.
Why not this kettle lake, carved out
of the underlying rock by the glaciers?
The Indian, a Mingo, had told him
about this place, and called it
Conneautee. So here it was,
just as the guide had promised,
a placid little loch just half a mile
across, with pines enough around
to build a town, flat land for grain,
and for the grist mill he would build;
for grain and whisley were the way
to wealth. “What think
you, wife?” he asked his silent consort.

Jeanette took in the sweep of clouds,
the sky-enfolding blue waters, watched
as a flock of crows cawed and winged
welcome. “I like it,” she said.
The half-naked Indian grunted.
If he knew more about the place,
he said nothing. The dark swamp
nearby was well concealed by trees
and the nodding cat-tails. (No need
to upset them about what lived there
and how no one slept well
on certain nights when sorrow
rose like a beast from the bottom!)
Man, woman, horses and wagon
stood for a long time, the little clouds
of their breathing in chill air
as calm as a peace pipe.
Everything they owned,
     they had dragged here.

Down at the lake-edge
their shiny boots ground
time-worn gravel beneath them.
They knew nothing of Ice Ages,
departing glaciers and porous
limestone. They did not know
how shallow the soil was, how brief
the growing season, how deep
the snows piled on in winter,
a place where frost came in August
and snow remained till May.

Still, nothing could be worse
than Scotland: this they would say

on all the winter nights to come.

They canoed to the north, reed grass
and full of inlets, fish abounding,
fens buried in mists, tall pines bent
and fallen to the earth. Something
had walked here unhappily, storms
called down in its anger. Pray
that its time has come and gone!

Pools dank with toads alternated
with blue patches herons favored.
Fog started there, it seemed.
The dusk-mist that rose
around them thickened.
Only the warm spot of sunglow
guided them back again.

And then they found the creek,
the lake’s shallow outlet,
good land on either side
for houses, a place to dam up
and run his mill. All good,
it seemed. “This is home,”
he said to his wife, “now
and for all the time we have left.”

“There’s no church,” she worried.
“Oh that will come,” he answered.
“There will be no stopping them.”
“What shall we call the place?”
“Edinburgh.” He said. “The only city
worth its name in all of Scotland.”

The sun set, the swamp exhaled
its methane-rich vapors, the frogs
began their melancholy chorus.
Back at the lake-edge vantage,
they made their tent, their fire
the first that the land had seen
in over a hundred years.

They did not dream that night,
but something in and under them
dreamt of their lives and deaths,
their burials on this very ground,
the slow seep of waters upwards,
an inverse sun rising
in the names of their children to come.
______

Note 1: Cussewago was the Indian name for Meadville, PA.

1973, rev. December 2019, Rev April 2020