The Mattress, Vertical

Photo by Tony Buba, 2020. Used with permission.

by Brett Rutherford

after a photo by Tony Buba


The mattress, vertical,
sleeps none.
Sleepers and dogs
and cats, flakes
of dry skin and dust mites,
a slurry of cracker crumbs
and the sighs of forgotten
orgasms, have sloughed away
into the hungry soil
of the abandoned weedlot.

The mattress, vertical,
more like a tombstone
than a nuptial platform,
dimpled with stitching,
dappled with silhouette
of starving tree-scape,
is hungry for occupants,
makes do with shadows —

a traffic cone considers
a rest, inscribes a "V",
then an inverted signature,
as if to stake a claim.
The photographer, retired,
just comes up short
of putting his outline there.
He hesitates; he's nearly
always sleepy this time of day.
One step forward, one
step back, he hesitates.

No one would notice
if he reclined a while,
just thirty minutes until he'd
be as good as new. But no:
the thought of bedbugs,
hands reaching for his camera,
the curiosity of skunk and badger.

Better to let
a mattress, vertical
go on about
its very important business.
Whatever that is.

Ode 2: The Thunderstorm (1968)

by Brett Rutherford

We were alone, slum-student-
house apartment, windows agape
into a rainstorm,

hot summer viewed as multiples

through fly-eyed screens, each eye-spread
alike intoning solitude, pinpoints of night,
scattered and re-assembled.

Impossibilities abroad,
walk on the howling wind,

invisibly strut
between the streetlight cycles,
translate through mesh as spectral whirl,
their passing marked by sourceless rings
spun out on pools of rain.

Across the square,
someone else’s windows

spill out blackness,

a tumbling emptiness

where lights had been.
Have they gone to sleep
or do they reach for one
another over there, in

blundering lust? Does someone
over there moan, “Please!”
and the other cries, “Yes”?

Or does another solitude therein,
sigh and partake

of yearning night? For after all,
what is a storm but electrical
attraction gone mad? Most
creatures hide from a tempest,
and he who hides, trembles
alone in the dark.

Two in an arm-chair,

we lean and look

at the gaping empty
mouths of storefronts,
a neon flicker, failing,
from the Hotel Bar.

High-minded, we
ridicule the passions,

pretending my hand that touches your arm
is not and does not what it seems

but is a mere acting-out
of the diamond-spun

songs from a phonograph.

I share

the singer’s illusion, loss, and hope,
the stuff of blues and Broadway.
The songs are never true; they are
always and ever about the thing
you want, but cannot have.

I on the verge of dangerous descent,
gulp in a breath of cynic air,

but what I draw, what sifts
through the wind-tattered
screen, belies the song,
is love.

Later, I find you, already asleep
(or feigning sleep), the half-bed
moon-dark inviting me.

I hold you, warmed by your heat,
blessed by my storm-wrought hope,

while in the next room

two lovers sweat obliviously.
(They have abandoned themselves,
but neither you nor I can
surrender to this moment.)

So I, poised where our bodies touch
lay dreamless, feeling you breathe,
you, in wanting and terror, feel
my breath and pulse and wanting.

Dawn finds me at the lakeside bench
accusing the sun and sparrow flight

for ending my happiness.
You were still sleeping; perhaps
you only think you dreamt of me.

If only your dreaming self

could wed my waking madness!

 --Edinboro, PA, 1968, Revised February 2020

When It Rains, It Rains Financiers

by Brett Rutherford

Published as "Quand Il Pleut, Il Pleut des Financiers"

after Magritte's painting, "Golconde"

America, awake! Last night Connecticut
suffered a fall of financiers, precipitate
from aerial fleets unseen and traceable
to nowhere on or in the globe.
At dawn a gray cascade
of overcoats and bowler hats
commenced, each agent replete
with tie and unscuffed shoes,
each with a grim and businesslike

demeanor —  a few, with executive
gray sideburns, clasped briefs
full of significant business plans
and letters of unlimited credit.

Only a few insomniacs
witnessed this chute des etrangers,
silent as dew and just as discreet,
without a flutter of parachute,
without a crease in the perfect lawns.
The anti-Newtonian host
walked with deliberate speed
to the waiting commuter trains
from whence they vanished
unnoticed into Wall Street,
courthouse and brokerage,
library and chapel, gone —  
gone and never seen again!

Imposters! Who knows what plots
they hatched in their resemblance
to no one at all! Within days the banks
were belching loans; the wives at home
had well-dressed afternoon lovers;
dogs stood confused at whom to heel
or whom to bar from the kitchen door.

The birth rate rose astonishingly,
as featureless babies that refused to cry
swamped the suburban nurseries.

And this was just the start: the cloud
that made them was but a wisp
of a much larger storm, forging
its turgid thunder into an army
of Nobodies, incurable bores
intent on crowding out everyone
who’s read a book or has an opinion.
Their secret handshakes and nods,
the curious little lapel pins
that your eyes can’t focus on,
the sinister stripes on their ties
not corresponding to any known school
or regiment; the half-wink
they seem to use to greet one another,
smirking at others’ exclusion:

these were the symptoms, alien
and alienating. There were more
like them with each passing month.
The “suits,”
as they called themselves, were here to stay.
As for the rest of us, we
were merged and acquired,
outsourced, down-sized,
shown to the door by security,
Romneyed and pension-plundered,
rezoned, foreclosed,
eminent-domained, evicted,
bankrupted and down-debited,
rust belt trailer park shantied –

just as it was planned
in their spreadsheets,
forecast in their Powerpoint
laptop cellphone wireless
global master plan.

We were only here
to serve the Nobodies
on their road to acquiring
Absolutely Everything.

In the Ghoul-Haunted Woodland

by Brett Rutherford

It is not difficult to write rhymed verse, once one has read a lot of it. I destroyed all my semi-suicidal juvenilia, but sometime around 1990, these lines came back into my memory -- almost all of a poem I had written while I was a sophomore in high school. It is "Ulalume," of course, with a little Lovecraft added. The last stanza would not come back to me in full, but the final lines are, I, think awfully good. There are are few good lines along the way, and I am sure that my adult consciousness made a few of the stanzas better than the lost original. It is offered her for the fun of it, and it probably would red well out loud. 
Curiously, I can remember standing alone in a classroom after school, because I did not want to go home, thinking, not of poetry, but of the main theme from the third movement of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. The rhythm of the poem comes from that music, which has nothing whatever supernatural about it. One cannot account for how things fit together in the mind of a young man who has read Poe.

I can count on a little more than one hand the number of my rhymed poems (one in elegiac stanzas I like a lot), but I am firmly again rhyme 99% of the time.

Here goes:

Upon that plain of fancied dreams

     where I have nightly wandered,

beneath the willows of my tears, I chanced,

     and paused, and pondered.

The moon, a luminescent orb,

     rose high above the trees:

the willows wept, the silence crept,

     bestilled the very breeze.

The moon I saw was pale and white,

     but yet, a tinge of bronze,

an umber crown, an aura’d sphere,

     spun gold upon the lawns.

I came with dread into this wood,

     I came with dark defeat;

I walked with blasted hope amid

     the Eclipse of Love’s heat.

Dead! dead! the eyes that answered mine

     with velvet promise under

stars that laughed and spelled one name,

     then tore our love asunder.

Tonight there is no constancy of sun,

     no orbit free of shade —

each screaming world falls one by one

     into the dark it made!

Black stars in blacker clouds now rise

     above the cypress grove;

black thoughts within your sepulchre

     that summon and reprove

my days of solitude and gloomy verse,

     my nights of vigil at your side,

my pleas to nonexistent gods

     that Love would triumph and abide.

Some creature of the Nocturne, from some

     timeless, shadowed land,

climbed down from out the treetops

     in the heights before my hand,

came down before my startled view

     and thereupon took rest —

in awe I waited, watched, and put my

     saneness to the test…

Its face was cold and black, and frozen

     like the stars

and yet its eyes—if eyes they were—

     were streaked with flaming bars...

Its breath seeped out, enveloped me,

     a wave of rank decay,

my hurried blood ran rampant

     to the echoes of dismay...

I turned to flee this haunted wood …

A limb or claw, an arm or hand,

     whatever tool of hell,

reached out and pulled me firmly back —

     I stumbled and I fell!

In the Forest of the Wendigo

Barbara A. Holland and I both wrote poems about The Wendigo, the terrifying wind elemental known to all the Native Americans from Canada all the way down through Pennsylvania and Ohio. In Holland's notebooks, amid sketches for her Wendigo poems, I found three short poems in which expressed her profound fear of the American woods. I revised them slightly and combined them into this little suite.

IN THE FOREST OF THE WENDIGO

by Barbara A. Holland

1. LOST

The long-house has wandered off
somewhere and I am left behind
to find it. The stars stick in the branches
of the highest trees that have no green
save at the top of the naked trunks.

Beneath the slip-slide footing
of pine needles, something way down
rumbles and shakes the ground
with muttering scarce-heard. I feel it
in my bones. I wonder
if on some far-off island
they are dying, or shouts
of warning rise to the clouds.

The web of a spider
burns my face. Whiskers
of fog feel out for me.

2. THE SECRET

A glade. An opening in the woods
where anything might happen.
Now the forest wakes. The grasses
cease to move. The bushes liberate
their hoarded twittering. The bull frogs
stop their vocalise, but yet
the moss invites me a lie down,
while the trees part in anticipation
of I know not what.
                                     I run and run
until I am exhausted. The forest
can keep its secret.
I shall not intrude on what
it may or may not foster.

3. IN THE DEEP WOODS

When I hear the ground
crunching followed by the sound
of bells, I know that he
is nor far off, that monstrous, tall
hunter in whose ear Hiawatha
rode; that behind a clump of trees
his laughter wobbles the juniper
and soars to a mighty screech,

that I had best be going home.
I do not care to have him
swing downward with his tomahawk.

These woods are treacherous
with spirits. I must not look
nor to the right or left but keep on going.
He is laughing
at the death that fouls our waters,
above the earth that is poisoned
     by the same stuff,
giving bad breath to his laughter,
our self-inflicted hatchet-thrust
the destruction of our woods.

The Secret

by Brett Rutherford

Since you had to leave town, I lived
in West Newton with Gertrude and Claudius.
The town hugged two river banks
of the angry, dark Yoghiogheny. Hornets
buzzed on the bridge that divided it.
Trains roared through the middle
of the tiny main street. It was a place
you went when you needed to be
where no one knew your original name
or why you left where you came from,
where a man and a woman could pretend
to be married, and no one asked
for proof on paper. So I was Hamlet,
in teen-boy guise, housed with my mother
and the man who was once an uncle,
now a no-name lord of the manor.
In my basement laboratory I tried
in vain to make alchemical potions
that might turn a grown man to a frog,
or tastelessly poison a chutney jar.
None of my called-down curses ever worked.
The miscreant sat in his TV room at night
watching Gunsmoke and John Wayne westerns.
My mother spawned a daughter, and then
a son as well, while “Uncle” spewed scorn
on my useless, book-centered universe.
He railed against Jews, bragged that the town
would never build a park or a swimming pool
“’cause if we did, the niggers would come.”

I stayed at school as late as I could,
volunteered for anything that kept
my presence from his shadow.
He made me know I was not welcome,
a bookworm boarder to last as long
as the child support payments came
from my silent and absent father,
and after that, “I want you gone.”

The house had one book only
that was not mine: on the dryer,
opposite their bedroom door,
a well-leafed copy of Lady Chatterley’s

Lover that opened instantly
to the sex scenes. My uncle
had used it to seduce my mother,
sweet poison to eye and ear.

I tried to imagine their coupling,
but judging from the contents
of the medicine cabinet, for
hemorrhoids, psoriasis, and
unpronounceable ailments, all
I could picture was something
like a Hammer Films blob
undulating upon a mattress,
as though two pizza slices
had toppled upon one another
inside the melting oven.

The new town
tolerated me. I had Latin at last
to occupy my thoughts,
new streets to haunt,
a vast night gallery
of riverside graves
where I could brood
and plan my escape
or some spectacular
suicide.

When poetry came.
I figured I wouldn’t last
to thirty, anyway.

When summer came
and I could run off
to my grandmother’s house,
a scant five miles
from Scottdale,
the exultation of home
came back to me.

I phoned my friends,
and one by one their mothers
answered and said, “No.
Tim’s not around.” “Dave
won’t be around this summer.”
“Tom is not permitted
to take a phone call right now.”

I never saw my friends again.

Decades – no, a lifetime later,
I hear from an old neighbor,
the Polish girl whose porch
we could see from our kitchen
window. “You were just gone,
she told me. “One day, just gone.
Our parents wouldn’t tell us why
you were gone. Your whole family
just vanished without a word.”

I choked up as she told me,
“We cried forever.”

My mother took up
with my father’s sister’s husband,
and not content to run away,
they wove a story:
that my father and his sister
“did it first.” Incest, that is.

Their proof: a missing condom
that his young daughter and a friend
had blown up as a water balloon
and thrown away in secret;
and the mailman’s account
of seeing someone naked
moving around in the afternoon,
pale skin viewed through panes
of an inner doorway.

So, armed with “They did it first”
and D. H. Lawrence, the furtive nights
and parked-car couplings began.
Two divorces, and the flood
of door-to-door and phone-
to-phone gossiping. Have you heard
about the Rutherford incest?
Brother and sister — the mailman saw
everything. And wasn’t it almost
incest, what the other two did,
a woman and her in-law?

More than four decades later
I came to the town again. The street
of yellow bricks greeted me
with a full rainbow against
the backdrop of nearby hills.

It was just a town. A place
of stately homes, a new library,
a red brick church
my great-grandparents helped build.

I ought to feel happy here.
The graves of my ancestors
are here in their fine plots.
My grandfather had been Burgess,
a great-uncle a financier;
even a Rutherford bookstore once.

Yet I kept looking backwards,
tense at each corner expecting
the crowd with pitchforks,
torches hastily lit to be rid of me.

Who can undo
the evil of false witnessing?
Who can come home
to where they “cried forever?”

The Headless Cross at Elsdon

by Brett Rutherford

     after a dirge by Robert Surtees

Her lover died at the Nine-Stone Rig

from seven brothers’ rage;

nine the arrows that shower’d down,

arms, heart, and throat, and eye

a-shiver with the hate-fletched shafts,

a-quake with their envenom’d darts,

a double death of blood and poison,

all this to avenge a virginity lost!

They shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig,

beside the cursèd cross of Thor

(false Dane who absolution shunned),

a fitting place to die.

They left him lying in his blood,

red on green moss, black on brown earth.

The fled and vowed to kill again

if her illicit union spawn’d.

A Lapland wind, a raven dark,

lapped at the blood and plucked the eye,

the one blue orb unarrow’d,

and brought it to the lady fair.

She fainted, for she knew that eye,

beneath which she had loved and sigh’d.

And then she summon’d her menials

to search the wet, cold ground for him.

They made a bier from broken boughs

of the birch and the aspen gray.

Nine arrows they broke and cast away

at the foot of the Headless Cross.

They bore him to Our Lady’s Chapel.

None dared to refuse his passing-in.

The lady arrived. Her servant brought

The azure eye in a silver chalice.

She placed the eye in the blacken’d hole

where once it had glistened and tear’d.

The other had but the stump of wood

where the unkindest dart of all

Had blinded him, and reft her soul.

They waked him there all day; by night

the tapers burned as monks and nuns

gave out heart-rending Requiems.

As they came at last to bear him off,

the lady threw her robes aside,

in favor of an ashen shift sleev’d

and collar’d with crimson and black.

With waters blessed from Our Lady’s well,

she bathed the corpse, and washed it clean

of the thrice-three poison’d wounds.

(Her wound only did she not regret).

She plaited a garland for on his breast,

and a garland for on his hair.

The raven upon her shoulder lit.

The Lapland wind made dark the room

As the tapers all flickered and died.

They rolled him in a winding sheet

     ah, lily-white it was! And as

the Virgin’s water had him blessed

No mark of blood appeared.

They bore him to a new-made grave,

and passing by the Chapel Garth

they paused to let the Gray Friars sing

in yet another Requiem. But where

would the lady bury her lover?

Not in the family crypt where bones

might still be ravaged by those

same seven brothers she now loathed!

Not in some crowded churchy ground

where twenty years hence they’d dig

and pile his bones with strangers’ skulls!

She chose the place, in dark of wood

where first they had met, o fatal spot!

a bower beneath a spreading beech.

In murk of midnight they buried him,

where the dew fell cold and still,

in windless fell of untrembling leaf

where the mists cling to the hill.

They dug his grave just a bare foot deep,

where she had happily laid with him:

see where the heather flower blooms,

and the moss and the lady-fern.

A Gray Frair stood upon that grave

and sang until the sun rose true,

another sings yet for the lover's soul

at the foot of the Headless Cross.

— Op. 1055 February 2, 2020.

Edith of Hilton and Harold the Dane

by Robert Surtees (Northumbrian poet and historian)

Another poem involving a romance with a were-raven came from the pen of Robert 
Surtees, a correspondent who supplied some fabricated ballads to Sir Walter Scott. 
This poem was included by Surtees, without attribution, in his History of Durham. 
The poet considers this to be a legend of the possible Danish ancestry for the Hilton 
family. The raven here is associated with Odin and his messenger ravens. Surtees 
observes, “It should, however, he recollected, to say nothing of Leda and such by-
gone times, that the Ascanian princess of Saxony sprung from the loins of a bear, 
and, which is more to the purpose, that the Staffords of Buckingham chose to 
descend from a white swan.”

His fetters of ice the broad Baltic is breaking,
In the deep glens of Denmark sweet summer is waking,
And, blushing amidst her pavilion of snows,
Discloses her chalice the bright Lapland rose.
Yet the leaves that the tempest has strewn on the ground
Are whirling in magical eddies around.
For deep in the forest where wild flowers are blushing,
Where the stream from its cistern of rock-spar is gushing,
The magic of Lapland the wild winds is hushing.
Why slumbers the storm in the caves of the north?
When, when shall the carrier of Odin go forth?

Loud, loud laughed the hags as the dark raven flew,
They had sprinkled his wings with the mirk midnight dew,     (1)
That was brushed in Blockula from cypress and yew.                (2)
     That raven in its charmed breast
     Bears a sprite that knows no rest —
     (When Odin’s darts, in darkness hurl’d,
     Scattered lightnings through the world;
     Then beneath the withering spell.,
     Harold son of Eric fell) —
     Till lady, unlikely thing I trow,
     Print three kisses on his brow —
Herald of ruin, death, and flight,
Where will the carrier of Odin alight?

What Syrian maid in her date-covered bower,
Lists to the lay of a gay troubadour?
His song is of war, and he scarcely conceals
The tumult of pride that his dark bosom feels;
From Antioch beleaguer’d the recreant has stray’d,
To kneel at the feet of an infidel maid;
His mail laid aside, in a minstrel’s disguise
He basks in the beams of his Nourjahad’s eyes.
Yet a brighter flower in greener bower,
     He left in the dewy west,
Heir of his name and his Saxon tower;
     And Edith’s childish vest
Was changed for lovelier’s woman’s zone,
And days and months and years have flown,
     Since her parting sire her red lips prest.

And she is left an orphan child
In her gloomy hall by the woodland wild;
A train of menials only wait
To guard her towers, to tend her state,
      Unlettered hinds and rude.                            (3)
Unseen the tear-drop dims her eye,
Her breast unheeded heaves the sigh,
And youth’s fresh roses fade and die
     In wan unjoyous solitude.

Edith, in her saddest mood,
     Has climbed the bartizan stair;                    (4)
No sound comes from the stream or wood,
     No breath disturbs the air.
The summer clouds are motionless,
     And she, so sad, so fair,
     Seems like a lily rooted there,
In lost forgotten loneliness.
A gentle breeze comes from the vale,
And a sound of life is on the gale,
And see a raven on the wing,
Circling around in airy ring,
Hovering about in doubtful flight —
Where will the carrier of Odin alight?

The raven has lit of the flag-staff high
     That tops the dungeon tower;
But he has caught fair Edith’s eye,
And gently, coyly, venturing nigh,
     He flutters round her bower;
For he trusted the soft and maiden grace
That shone in that sweet young Saxon face.
     And now he perched on her willow wand,
And tries to smooth his raven note,
And sleeks his raven coat,
     To court the maiden’s hand.
And now caressing and caress’d,
The raven is lodged in Edith’s breast;
’Tis innocence and youth that makes
In Edith’s fancy such mistakes;
But that maiden kiss hath holy power
O’er planet and sigillary hour;
The elvish spell has lost its charms,
And a Danish knight is in Edith’s arms;
And Harold, at his bride’s request,
His barbarous gods forswore,
Freya and Woden, and Balder and Thor;
And Jarrow with tapers blazing bright                 (5)
Hail’d her gallant Proselyte.

Footnotes
1 Mirk. Murky, shadowed, obscure.
2 Blockula. Blockula is originally the same place as the island Blå Jungfrun, which was in old days called Blåkulla. Associated with the Swedish witch trials, a considerable lore grew up around Blockula as a gathering place of witches, where, in orgies with Satan, a variety of demonic creatures were spawned.
3 Hinds. Household servants (from the Middle English and Northumbrian).
4 Bartizan. An overhanging turret of a castle.
5 Jarrow. Town on the River Tyne in Durham County, home of the Venerable Bede.

From the forthcoming Poet's Press/ Yogh & Thorn edition, Tales of Terror: The Supernatural Poem Since 1800, Volume 3.