Two Times Haunted

by Brett Rutherford

freely adapted from an Anglo-Saxon poem, “Scael se gaest cuman”

Two times, and two times only,
the soul returns to the body.

Your ghost shall come,
groaning and grievous,
when seven nights have passed.

If your mischance it is
to be the unburied dead,
it shall sit upon your breast

as though at feast
with raven, hawk and vulture.

It shall not deter them, tears
not of water made, cries
not of mortal mouth sounded,
hand ineffectual to beat
the carrion carnival away.

Or if you be in earth, fresh loam
upon the well-wept grave,
round it shall walk three times,
and on the slightest wind
its keening is imperceptible
to all but the smiling worms
as they begin the long business.

Add to your death night
three hundred years.

From where and when the souls
go about their grim reckoning,
it shall come to you again,
searching you out among ruins
and toppled stones, burned-out
buildings and places whose names
have become unpronounceable.

Still, none but witch or wizard

would be the wiser of its coming.

Frail and shrill, a dusty cobweb
of what you once were,

trailing its brittle fingers
amid the dust of the boneyard,
marking your skull among a heap
of your contemporaries, cast
into an ossuary pit, or
down to dust among forgotten urns.

Then shall its sad voice accuse you:
“Gory dust! why did you torture me
with the foulness of earth,
the agonized rot to clay returning?

“In all your idle days, did you think
to lay up a treasure for me? You lived,
you slept, you made love obliviously,
you lied and grew rich, averted your eye
from art or music or human charity.

“Why have I nothing to lay
at the feet of the cosmos
that has your name upon it?
Why for three hundred years
did you torture me,
you, the mere food of worms!”

The Pumpkined Heart Now Available

Brett Rutherford published The Pumpkined Heart in 1973 as a 48-page illustrated chapbook. Now, almost a half-century later, he has assembled all of his poems that have Pennsylvania as their locale, into one huge book, a kind of personal memoir in poems.

Three towns figure in this saga that spans early childhood to college years: Scottdale, in the coal and coke district when the skies were black with smoke and fumes from the coke-ovens; West Newton, a grim steelworkers’ town hugging the steep banks of the Youghiogheny River; and Edinboro, a college town in the northwest corner of the state, its placid lake setting contrasting with the tumult of Vietnam-era protest.

From early childhood in Scottdale, the poet casts himself as an outsider, breaking rules, recruiting neighbor children to act in “monster shows,” absorbing Native American lore from a story-telling grandmother, and learning about the Golem legend from Jewish neighbors. The other side of his family life is “out home,” where his maternal grandparents live in squalor in a tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets, left an indelible impression that emerges in “memory poems,” written many decades later. In “Peeling the Onion,” a grandmother relates to him the dark side of living alone in the mountains, and “the kinds of things that happen to women.”

Four high-school years in West Newton with a degenerating family and an evil stepfather are lightened by self-discovery: “I was a poet. A cape would trail behind me always.” Here he studies Latin, writes his first poems, and deepens his abiding love of the Gothic in literature and film. The fantasy poem “Son of Dracula” celebrates artistic birth, and “Mr. Penney’s Books” gratefully recalls the town’s one mentor for the unruly young, a bibliophile with 10,000 books.

Readers turning to the Edinboro section of this book will be startled by the transformation of theme and mood. Rutherford attaches himself to the town’s glacial lake, its flora and fauna, its sharp seasonal divides, and weaves them into a Whitmanesque vision. These poems, while modern in style, are in the spirit of Shelley, Whitman, Rilke, and Jeffers. Returning to the locale again and again over many decades for renewal and recollection, the poems celebrate what the poet calls, “my first-found home.” Other poems lift the veil on the student life of the time, and the choices one had to make about war or resistance.

The last section of the book, “Looking Backward,” includes retrospective poems, written from far away, that look back on the childhood places and events, rather than the straight-forward story-poems earlier in the book.

The longer poems here are stories in verse, several of them with multiple voices, most notably the four-voice tale, “The Doll Without A Face.” But all the poems are clear, easily read aloud, and aimed at the reader who may be wary of poetry.

This is the 286th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2020. 320 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $19.95. ISBN 9798639218460.

https://www.amazon.com/Pumpkined-Heart-Poems-Pennsylvania/dp/B087FGYZG4

At the Grave of the Suicide

by Brett Rutherford

     For S.F.

O Beauty, O Beauty,
     O Beauty too good for the world,
how you do rob us by your removal!
What was the use of your death
except to those who stand and weep?
Who must, in one life,
fill, and refill the cup of grief,
so early, and so many times?

I come to your stone,
my exhortation useless,
the gifts I gave or would have given
refused or cast back by the grave.
What would I not have given to save you?

If only magic could bring you back,
I would sit here with ring and book
until the world collapsed
     into its core of iron,
until the loam of the soil parted
and your dark laughter exploded
the long-sealed vault below!

If only souls were immortal!
(The heart breaks, wishing it were so,
hoping to force from nature
what it cannot give)

The weighted stone,
the too-deep water,
the ignominy of a found body,
the pointless inquest,
the baffled, pained, guilty faces
of the left-behind.

The poem you earned
is not the one
I wanted to give.

New York's Infamous Potter's Field

This morning I made up a chapbook of my two poems about new York City's "Island of the Dead," in infamous potter's field on Hart Island. Venice has an island cemetery full of magnificent monuments: New York's island cemetery is made of trenches dug by convicts and piled up three-high with the coffins of the unclaimed dead.

Here is the book, free to download and read:

https://archive.org/details/rutherford-the-island-of-the-dead/mode/2up

The Inhuman Wave -- Free Sample Pages

SAMPLE OF NEW NEXT BOOK, SOON TO COME AT AMAZON.

Spanning just one year of Brett Rutherford's poetic output, this 264-page collection shows the American neo-Romantic, Gothic poet at the peak of his powers. The new poems include biting satires and laments about the current decline of the United States, as might be expected from a self-professed "outsider." But there are many facets to this dazzling kaleidoscope of a book: childhood memories of the coal and coke towns of his Pennsylvania childhood; riveting narratives such as that of a freezing woman going from door to door begging for coal, or a grandmother telling her grandson about "the things that happen to women" living alone in the country; and memories of college years overshadowed by the Vietnam War. The supernatural, as always plays a large role, as an invisible monster lurks in a Pennsylvania swamp, angry Native American spirits pop the windows off skyscrapers and snap the wings off airplanes, Medieval thieves are magically prevented from robbing an Abbey; and the tale of a Danish girl, a raven, and her lover's eyeball. One of the darkest poems here is an imagined monologue of the crazed military Roman Emperor Domitian, as he leads a group of senators and oligarchs into his subterranean "Black Room."

Translations from Spanish, French, Old English, German, Danish, and Old Norse show the poet working in the tradition of American poets such as Longfellow, tapping the poems and lore of other times and cultures, yet making of them new works that delight (and caution) today's reader. Rutherford does not employ rhyme, so these adaptations flow like highly-condensed sketches or stories. At the heart of this book is a poem cycle started four decades ago and only now finished, an adaptation and expansion from German Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, titled Fatal Birds of the Soul. It transcends any label, not translation, not mere adaptation, swallowing the lines of Rilke into a web of interrogations.

The book also includes another cycle, as far from serious German verse as can be imagined. Titled Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn, it is an imaginary cat book about the adventures of a winged housecat. Based on notes left behind by poet Barbara A. Holland, this long narrative poem shows what happens when two Gothic poets attempt to write a "children's book." Of course no child would ever be allowed to read a book about drowned kittens, eating mice, and the horrors of being "snipped" at the veterinarian's office.

Here are some sample pages.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD.