Hyllus and the Chariot Driver

 by Brett Rutherford

HYLLUS AND THE CHARIOTEER

Anakreon, to Hyllus:

So last night I followed you, to the foot
of your street, to that Dionysian ruin
where men and youths commingle
’mid broken columns and pedestals.

I saw you there, “virgin” Hyllus
in quadruped surrender
to a popular chariot driver.

I watched and heard it all
from the anonymous shadows:
the brutal, pathetic beauty of it,
the animal moans,
     the false starts,
the invoking of gods,
the simultaneous gasping,
the hurried redress of tunic and belt,
the counting out of three small coins.

Others watched, and saw me watching;
their little nods admonishing me.
I almost laughed at how, departing,
you brushed aside my friend Harmodius,
all too willing to have a go with you,
with that quick and dismissive line:
“Only the hand that has held a whip
can ever hold mine!”

Small wonder that I have never possessed you,
slave as I am of scribbling,
more fond of vowels than hard-edged consonants,
my only rod the stylus. How strange
when beauty seeks not its merited worship,
leaving its pedestal for the dust,
kneeling for the promise of certain pain,
for such a negotiated, small price. 

November Desolation

by Brett Rutherford

My heart is a cenotaph.
My undelivered love notes
go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
where a drab  clerk files them indifferently
in the room where the wilted roses go.

 Why? Because I finally burned your portrait,
consigning frame and glass to the dumpster,
ripping to shreds the returned letter
that had come back four years ago, stamped
Addressee Unknown, not forwarded.

 If I do not think of you before my
sleeping, perhaps you will now shun my dreams.
Go! Forget that you came to me one night
with everything you owned in a suitcase,
and how you stayed, no questions asked, until
my music dispelled your inner darkness,
and how you explained, “I slept-walk, I guess,”
when I once woke to find you beside me.

 Go! Go! and if you circle back again,
I am not so sure I will remember you.
I am getting on, you know, and such rooms
as are full of cobwebs and dried-up lusts
are less appealing now. My cancel stamp
has learned the use of Return to Sender.

The Fence (Anniversarius 26)

 

by Brett Rutherford

Town fathers, what have you done?
Last night I returned
(I vowed — I made the lake a promise)
intending to tramp the lane of maples,
read with my palms the weary tombstones,
feast with my eyes the clouded lake,
lean with a sigh on founder’s headstone,
chatter my verses to turtles and fish,
trace with my pen the day lily runes,
    the wild grape alphabet,
the anagram of fallen branches,
all in a carpet of mottled leaves.
The mute trees were all assembled.
The stones — a little more helter-
    skelter than before,
but more or less intact — still greeted me
as ever with their Braille assertions.
The lake, unbleached solemnity 
    of gray, tipped up
and out against its banks to meet me.
All should have been as I left it.

Heart sinks. The eye recoils.
    My joy becomes an orphanage
    at what I see:
from gate to bank to bend
    of old peninsula,
    across the lot 
    and back again,
sunk into earth
    and seven feet high
A CHAIN LINK FENCE!

Town fathers, what have you done?
Surely the dead do not require protection?

Trees do not walk.
    The birds are not endangered.
How have your grandsires sinned
    to be enclosed in a prison yard?
As I walk in I shudder.
    It is a trap now.
    A cul-de-sac.
I think of concentration camps.

For years, art students painted here —
    I hear the click of camera shutters,
    the scratch of pens,
    the smooth pastel caress,
    taste the tongue lick of water color,
    inhale the night musk of oil paints.
Poets and writers too,
    leaning on death stones
    took ease and inspiration here,
    minds soaring to lake and sky.
At dawn, a solitary fisherman
    could cast his line here.

Some nights the ground would undulate
    with lovers
(what harm? who now would take
    their joy between two fences?)

The fence is everywhere! No angled view
can exclude it. It checkerboards
the lake, the sky, the treeline.

They tell me that vandals rampaged here,
    knocked over stones,
    tossed markers
         into the outraged waves.
Whose adolescents did this,
    town fathers?
                   Yours.
Stunted by rock and stunned by drugs, 
they came to topple a few old slabs,
struck them because they could not 
         strike you.

Let them summon their dusky Devil,
rock lyric and comic and paperback,
blue collar magic, dime store demons —
                    they wait and wait,
blood dripping from dead bird sacrifice
until the heavy truth engages them:

The dead are dead,
    magic is empty ritual,
         and stubborn Satan declines
to answer a teen age telegram.

Fence in your children, not our stones!

— October 25, 1989, Edinboro, Pennsylvania

End of the World (Anniversarius 21)

 

by Brett Rutherford

Not with a trumpet
  but a whisper.  No angels
proclaimed the end. Prophets
with sandwich signs
 did not predict it.
No tea-leaf ladies
  or noted astrologers
knew that the end would come
at half-past eight
  in the morning.

It was a Monday,
  (of all days!)
catching them dressed
for their funerals.

Who would have guessed
that this October,
instead of leaves
the people turned
and blew away,
that gravity,
the faithful plodder,
would take a holiday?

First some commuters
on a platform in Connecticut
fell straight into a cloudless sky
trying to hook
  to lampposts and poles
with flailing arms.

Even the oversize stationmaster
was not immune,
hung by his fingertips
to shingled roof,
an upside-down balloon.
His wig fell down,
the rest of him 
shot shrieking upwards.

Slumlords in Brooklyn
dropped rent receipts,
clutched hearts and wallets
as they exfoliated,
burst into red and umber explosions
and flapped away.

A Senator stepped down
from his bulletproof limo,
waved to the waiting lobbyist,
  (sweaty with suitcase
   full of hundreds)
only to wither to leaf-brown dust,
crumbling within his overcoat.

Stockbrokers adjusted their power ties,
buttoned their monogrammed blazers,
pushed one another from narrow ledge
falling from Wall Street precipice
into the waiting sky,
printouts and ticker tapes,
class rings and credit cards
feathering back down.

Bankers turned yellow,
wisped out like willow leaf
from crumpled pin-stripe,
filling the air
with streamers of vomit
as they passed the roof
of the World Trade Center.

The colors were amazing:
black women turned ivory,
white men turned brown and sere,
athletes swelled up
  to fuchsia puffballs,
Asians unfurled
  to weightless jade umbrellas.

Winds plucked the babies from carriages,
oozed them out of nurseries,
pulled them from delivery rooms,
from the very womb —
gone on the first wind out and upwards.

They filled the stratosphere
darkened the jet stream,
too frail to settle in orbit,
drifting to airless space.

They fell at last into the maw
of the black hole Harvester,
a gibbering god
  who made a bonfire
  of the human host
the whirling spiral of skeletons
a rainbow of dead colors
red and yellow and black and brown
  albino and ivory
parched-leaf skins a naked tumble.

The bare earth sighed.
Pigeons took roost in palaces.
Tree roots began
the penetration of concrete.
Rats walked the noonday market.

Wild dogs patrolled
  the shopping malls.
Wind licked at broken panes.
A corporate logo toppled
  from its ziggurat.
Lightning jabbed down
  at the arrogant churches
  abandoned schools
  mansions unoccupied

started a firestorm
a casual blaze
as unconcerned
as that unfriendly shrug
that cleaned the planet.

 — October 31, 1987, Providence-New York

The State Versus Autumn (Anniversarius 17)

by Brett Rutherford

Resolved: For the sake of decency
and the order of the land,
the Congress hereby abolishes
the unwanted month of October...

No more Octobers ever?
Has the Society to Outlaw Gloom at last
succeeded in the Senate halls?
Has the Lobby Against Dead Leaves
banished arborial pollution?
No trees, no bees, no bugs, no squirrels:
a paradise in the suburbs!

Resolved: That the falling of leaves
disrupts the conduct of business,
distracts our children from their studies,
depresses the widowed and elderly...
We hereby outlaw deciduous trees.

How long, then, till the squad cars come
with their phalanx of armored cops,
handcuffing my corner sycamore,
chainsawing the neighbor’s rowan tree,
tearing the vagrant maple from the street,
screaming with bullhorns for the ailanthus
to disperse from hillsides and parking lots,
interrogating runaway saplings all night,
wresting confessions from an effeminate birch?

The casualties will mount beyond reckoning,
the loss of leaves beyond count,
numbers too large for a superchip
or the chambered cranium of a C.P.A.

It’s a conspiracy, of course:
the Moral Majority, the Vatican,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons,
an arm-in-arm league of Fundamentalists,
their hidden object a simple one:

Outlaw Halloween! They claim
the day is a Communist plot,
a pact of Satan and Hollywood,
Beelzebub and Publishers’ Row,
a turning of innocent youth from God,
an anarchist’s field day,
a sadist’s orgy of pin-filled apples
and candies injected with LSD.

An ominous van passes my house
and returns and passes again
and returns and passes again,
this way, that way, slowing.
A long camera lens points at my window,
scanning my bookshelves, alert
for subversive posters on my walls.
The vehicle's side are painted
GOD, GUNS & TRUMP on one side,
and on the other,

NO MORE DEVIL'S NIGHT:
MAKE JESUS-WEEN A HOLIDAY.

On Halloween, the faithful complain,
you cannot tell who the homosexuals are.
On Halloween, too much of the world
tilts to the literal Devil’s side.
We got to get that Dutch-boy white Jesus
and his lambs, Wise Men and Virgins,
angels and all their kin on the sidewalks,
scarfing up candy so the dusky children
of heathen devils get no handouts ever.

The bill has amendments, of course.
It will be a felony to serve up Poe
to those of tender and gullible age.
Horror books and movies? Goodness, no!
Bradbury’s tales, and Brahms’ autumnal tones,
LeFanu and Bierce, Blackwood and James,
Hawthorne and Derleth, Leiber and Bloch,
a whole amendment proscribing Stephen King,
real or pseudonymous, and prison for life
for reading Lovecraft and his protégés!

And so, a stitch in time is made.
September’s harvest blinks
     to Jesus-Ween
and suddenly it's November
     prelude to winter’s barren hills.

October 1 to October 30 have vanished!
A month of mail will never be delivered.
Today at work, a marshal comes to my desk,
tears page after page from my calendar.

Now someone is blacking out words in the library books.
The date of my birth no longer exists.
There is gunfire outside the library.
All night I smell the paper burning.
As I read my on-line bibliography,
someone is back-space deleting lines
before my very eyes.

These politicians mean business!

 — September 1985/ October 1986, Providence RI/
Revised November 13, 2021.

October Is Coming! (Anniversarius 16)

 

by Brett Rutherford

1

Listen! There is a sudden pause
between my words and the surrounding
silences: no breeze, no hum
of street lamps, no tread of tire —
even the birds have missed a beat.
It is the first self-conscious tinge
of maple leaf red, the first
night-chill of the season.
It is the caesura of equinox —
it whispers a prophecy:
October is coming.

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from the things that bind you.
You will follow a strange wind northward.
You will tread the edge of glaciers
  and blush with the iron tinge of destiny.
You will come to earth in a strange place
where you will be known as a leaf from an alien tree
    and be feared for it,
where you will seek the tongue-touch of another
    rasping exile — and find it.

Not for you the comfort of old trees,
    old branches, old roots — 
now at last the buoyant freedom of the nearly
    weightless,
the eyrie-view above pine-tops, eddied above
    rain troughs and lightning rods,
bird-free,

drifting ghostlike and invisible on graveyard mound,
grazing the cheeks of grievers, pausing
    upon the naked backs of lovers,
tracing the mysterious barricades between 
    the kingdoms of strays,
colliding with children in their chaotic play — 

Hearing at night with brittle ears the plaintive sea,
    the wearing away of shoreline,
the woeful throb of the requiem of whales,
the madrigal of feeding gulls, the thrust beat
    of the albatross in its pinioned flight,
the hideous slurring of squids,
the inexorable gnashing of the machinery of sharks —

Mute, passive, dumb as a dead leaf 
    you shall hear them all —

You shall move among the avalanche of first snow,
amazed at the shattering of perfect ice,
its joyous crystalline tone as it falls,
the utterly new dimension of its remaining,
endlessly crushed and compacted and moved,
singed to a fog and sublimed away
as if it had never been, while you
still lay like an old coat in a hamper —
grayer, crisper, more decrepit than ever.

And you suspect your lingering immortality —
a leaf, a brittle parchment that no one can read,
a shard, a skeleton of cellulose,
a thread, a string, a lichen roost, a bird-nest lining,
a witness of ever-advancing decay and assimilation,
by becoming nothing, becoming everything.

2

Yet this is such an insubstantial fate.
I can think of it now in the context 
    of this human frame,
hands to write it, lips to speak it
    as transcendental prophecy.
Not only the dead but the living
can pass to this realm beyond matter.
All who have lived or ever will are there already
but only one in a thousand suspects it.

Why, then, do I crave for touching,
for arm-enfolding tenderness on winter nights?
Why do I ache for the line of a slender neck,
a moist surrender, the firmness of flesh,
the drumbeat sonnet of another’s heart
loud in my ears, the harmony
of pacing my breath to another’s breath,
falling limbs entwined into a trusting sleep, 
or waking first and thanking the gods
for this wall of life between me and uncertainty?

I do not know, except that love
is the fluid of the Muses,
the enhancer of meaning, chariot of purpose,
that one plus one is not two
    but infinity,

that entropy, this modern malaise
    of the wasting leaf
is the false side of the coin of nature —
base metal welded to hidden gold.

3

Listen! October is coming!

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from your ease and comfort
by the one who loves you. You will follow
a strange wind northward, not as surrender
to an autumn urge, but as a warrior
for Spring. Glaciers will shudder back
at the green fringe of your beard. Your smile
will make strangers trust you, ask to know
what manner of tree sends youthful emigrants —
even the dry-leaf exiles will stir at your arrival.

You shall not pass the winter in random flight,
    nor cling to the steeples and chimney-tops.

Not for you the graveyard and its lying testaments,
not for you the vicarious touching of lovers and losers —

All shall know you and say of you:
Here is the one who loves and risks all.
You shall not heed the devious sea
and the night-call of Neptune’s ravenous hosts.
The owl, the raven, the whippoorwill,
    the squirrel, the cat, the sparrow
shall teach you the ways of their defiance of season,
their hidden thrust for continuance.

Boisterous, active, strident as a new tree
    you shall take root again,
defying the shadow master of winter,
    the devil of frost,
refusing to yield one leaf to the ache-long nights.

And you rejoice in your numbered mortality,
in love, at risk of happiness for a single embrace,
at risk of loss and denial, too —
but knowing it and caring not.

A love, an eye, a heart, a hand,
a witness to ever advancing hope,
one to the power of infinity —
one plus a fraction, approaching,
but never reaching, duality.

4

Which shall it be? This orient autumn
or this renascent spring? This painless slide
into the lush oblivion of ash, or wing beat
in Daedalus flight to a promised star?

I only know that October is coming.
It will not be like any other October.

 — September 1985, Providence, RI

Green Things Are Melancholy (Anniversarius 12)

Some say these winter hills are sad.
I think not so. 

              Gray bark and snow
are just the world in homespun clad,

plain and simple, honest and bare
to branch and root,
                  dry underfoot —
these are the ones who do not dare

rebellion or unruly flight.
The withered sleep,
                  the dream they keep,
to them is wisdom’s light.

Green is the melancholy hue:
seedling and twig,
                blossom and sprig,
rioting upward, askew,

climbing aslant in May’s folly
following one
             devious sun—
how can this be melancholy?

Just ride the suicidal breeze:
seed-spewing trees,
                 lecherous bees,
the wingèd birds’ hypocrisies —

These are false harbingers of joy.
What use are they?
                Their vernal play
is but a manic’s  fevered ploy.

Wait till the frost arrives — what then?
The birds fly south.
                  The wizened mouth
of fruit and flower saddens men

With bitter kisses youth should scorn —
the chill and numb
                  chrysanthemum
as blanched and dry as ravaged corn —

The maples shorn have been undone —
the barren vine
              a twisted line
of snake embracing skeleton —

The lily stalks are cripple canes.
The pale worm flees
                   the apple trees.
A gray mist fills the lanes.

Green is the hue
          betraying you
for a handful of earth
         or a moment of dew!

 — December 17, 1978, New York; revised 1981, 1993, rewritten in 1995.

A rare example of a Rutherford poem that rhymes.

Dead Leaves the Emblems Truest (Anniversarius 11)

 

Autumn
         love the Autumn
would fill the earth with perpetual
Autumn;
         if I were rich enough
I’d follow Autumn everywhere,
paint my home in Shelley’s orange
    and brown and hectic red;
rub tincture of turning leaves
onto my own limbs to motley
    my skin into a panoply
    of hues; buy potted trees
and fill my darkened rooms with them,
inject them full of October
until I lay ankle deep in fallings
of pages more wrinkled and withered
and crisped and sere than poor Poe’s

Spring
    I salute only as birth-of-death
Summer    its ripening
Autumn    the fruit
Winter       the ice-toothed bacchanal
    of rampant death

Dead leaves the emblems truest of what we are:
cut to a rasping skeleton by time,
best in our wormwood age,
most useful to our kind
when closest to verge of nothingness.

How wise you are, detached
    at last from your origins,
borne by a wind that will not betray you,
confident, sun-singed, beyond all pain,
surging toward heaven without an enemy
    to hold you back, assured of what
is written in your own veined hand —
that you are a particle of glory returning to god.

To god? What folly! like old men whose legs
cannot support them you tumble down in heaps.
You burn in hecatombs, boots crush you to dust;
you are composted until the merest speck of you
is salt for the cannibal taproots of Spring.

Magnificent folly! For what is there at the end
of a billion misled heartbeats but this putting on
of shrouds? Should we not deck ourselves as well
as the oak tree, as maples jubilant,
or triumph-touched in willow’s gold?

I think I shall be Autumn’s minister.
Instead of those hearts torn out for the Aztec god,
I offer up a basket of leaves; instead of blood
upon the butcher block of Abraham I slay
a wreath of myrtle and laurel boughs;
upon the thirsty cross I nail a scarecrow Christ,
a wicker man with leaf-catch crown of thorns —

It was the cross itself that died for us
    the man a nobody
         a tree-killing carpenter

And folly still!
    The lightning limns the bare branch elm
 The hollow trunk howls thunder of its own
         to oust the thunder of god

The slaked storm passes, the fire-striped
         masts of the earth-ship stand.
Ear to the tree trunk, I hear the echo
         of the storm, the last tree-
         spoken words:

   I bring you glad tidings —
                     There is no god.

There is no god, and when trees speak
the storm falls back in silence, shamed
    and reprobate.
There is no god, and when trees speak
    you kill them for the truth
    you cannot bear.

 — June 14, 1981, Madison Square Park, New York City, rev. 2011.

The Grim Reaper (Anniversarius 10)

Autumn, and none too soon for me.
Bitter blasts unshingle the trees
and scatter the birds — the diminution
to bone branch by gale’s tooth.

Ave! I welcome you, Red Harvester
of yet another year! I kindle fire
and hold my midnight watch atop a hill.

Ave! for everything awaits you:
the arbor picked clean of fruit,
the willows decked in banners of gold,
the windfall of currency
   from the abundant oaks.

Ave! Great Reaper who takes a year of everything.
Great Reaper who grinds the present to dust,
Great Reaper the only god (the others no more
than barricades you sweep aside, leaf dunes)

I see you. Your eyes play through me as easily
as sight itself moves through these barren trees.
You have no face. Two flames from out
your hooded darkness acknowledge me.
The scythe on which the world-end hone
but lately sang is in your hand.

My time is not yet come, thrice hailèd one.
I too must reap. I too must count the census
of lost leaves. My song must satisfy
before your hand can take the sheaf.
This space, this interstice between
the solstices is safe. My time
is not yet come.

 — December 17, 1978, New York; revised 1981

October Reckonings (Anniversarius 9)

The seasons merge: from a sunless autumn,
to winter without snow. What month it is,
is anybody’s guess. The yard goes dry,
the grapes cut back turn brittle; brown
sparrows tramp noisily for last desserts
on arbor top; ailanthus arms take on
a sere and whiter hue, no trace
of tropic sprays of verdure now, no flag
like native trees, of where the green had been
(perhaps they migrate and plant themselves
on other trees!) It is a time
of reckonings, to heap the harvest up
and count each gain against its cost.


Little it means to measure what was lost —
the never had’s a finer feast to sup.
It has a wine (whoever sees
the cask forgets himself and imitates
its salty plaint) from where the grapes had been,
of tears and rust and vanities, no flag
sincere of deeds or worth, no brace
of reason’s air; drinking us in it sprouts
its arrows from inside our hearts.
It speaks of love, its tendrils crown
arbors without leaves. What year is it?
All lonely autumns are alike
at winter’s verge.


— December 19, 1976, New York

This poem is a "mirror." The second stanza attempts, loosely, to write "backwards," echoing lines, sounds, and construction from the first stanza. Thus, the opening phrase "The seasons merge" shows up at the very end of stanza 2 as "at winter's verge." The final line of stanza 1, "and count each gain against its cost" becomes the first line of stanza 2 as "Little it means to measure what was lost." Even the actions in stanza 2 are backwards: arrows sprouting from inside hearts, a feast with an empty wine cask that drinks in the reveler, tendrils on a leafless arbor. Lack is everwhere from the first stanza: sunless autumn, snowless winter.

I Persist in Green

Here on this hill there was no blossom time.
Though all was green, no nectar bee went forth
to fetch his fellows for a harvesting.
The scavengers give me a bleak report,
avoid my limbs where neither fruit nor nut
nor even bitter berries fall to ground.
I wait, still green with poetry, still wrapped
this autumn in dreams of Eden’s April.
I am denied the killing kiss of frost —
one of a kind, I must stand sentinel,

 watching as all the other trees go gray,
stripped bare by teasing wind, their naked arms
a stark and spindly silhouette on clouds.
I listen to their brittle colloquy,
see through and beyond their herded huddling
the universe their summer glyph concealed.

 The sun and stars have dragged the fruiting urge
to climes unseen, but I persist in green.
I wave my rustling, needled arms aloft,
exude a youthful fragrance, still let the sap
fill my old head with springtime dalliance. 

I call in thousands of lonely sparrows,
converse with the unwanted beggar birds,
invite the nests of those who stayed behind,
ignoring the season’s bleak intelligence.
Stay here, hawk-free and sheltered from the storm!
Our wormless winter, though lean as a bone,
is spent with friend and feather, not alone.

 Should I envy the others — the red-flagged
maples, the golden willows, browning oaks?
Is nakedness to wind more honest, then?
Are roots more wise when bald of leaves above?

Look at those tattered and abandoned nests!
Read me — my rings can prove and testify
whose way of wint’ring is the better lot!

 The slanting, icy sun accuses me,
fringes with frostbite my emerald crown.
No fevered red, no golden rash, no brown
of rust has marred me — let winter come!
Should I not fear the hubris-humbling flood,
the thrust of fire from angry thunderers?

 Am I too boastful of my isolate,
self-centered endurance? No god has come
to topple me, no hatchet-man has climbed
to mark or cut me for cabin timber.

 One thing there is that can make me tremble:
I have dreamt of the distant mountain range,
of hill beyond hill, and peak surmounting
peak, of crags an eagle dares not soar to,
of nameless unscaled turrets of granite.
On each there grows, as here, an untamed tree,
alone and defiant,  giant and free.

 I dream, too, of an alpine wanderer,
whom I have ever loved, though never seen.
I bloom before the Passionate Stranger,
whose words bring news of my exiled brethren;
I bear strange fruit that falling, speaks and sings
new wonders to the astonished sparrows.
Then I blush red and amber and ochre,
shrugging my leaf-fall in a cry of joy.

 We hold a strange communion, traveler
and tree. Kings of our kind, we cannot bow,
but lean into the wind together, twined
till cloth and bark, flesh and root-tap mingle.
To him, I make the wind that is Autumn;
to me, he makes the hope that will be Spring.
Holding dead leaves in one another’s palms,
we are the sum of blossom, pollen, seed and fruit.
We are the thing we loved, the self made whole
by loss of self in love’s surrendering.

 — December 1973, Edinboro, Pennsylvania; rewritten in 1995

Night-Shift on Calvary

 by Brett Rutherford

adapted from Victor Hugo

 Lit by moon and starlight, they worked all night,
dig and hurl, dig and hurl, the stones and sand,
cross-diggers obscure in a morning fog
that blankets their labors from the unforgiving sky,

no one, even if up at dawn, can hear
the muffled sounds of their pick and shovel
from the clouded upslope of Calvary,
for the River Kidron roars angry below them,

swelling its flood-banks in rebellion.
They stop their work when they have dug two holes.
No one will ever know their importance,
how every wooden cross demands a brand new hole

 in which to stand it; how on this waste-place
of loose rock and shifting sand, earth swallows
up and fills again whatever one digs.
And there is engineering too, to raise a cross 

so that it does not lean and totter so
its passenger might be untied and freed,
the hole must be sufficient in its depth;
and vertical, to meet the centurion’s demands.

 “It’s done. It’s done. Let’s go to get our pay!”
one says to the other. — “I’d rather stay
on afterwards,” the younger one replies.
“Two thieves are going to be put up here today.

“That draws a crowd. I can double my lot
when the gambling starts. One bets on which dies
first. A lottery there is on whether
the crows come, and how many eyes they take.”

 “I am not so cruel,” the elder  protests.
“Work is work, and food is on the table.
Better this than to be the carpenter
who fashions these execution machines all day!”

 But then, like a crouching tiger, a shape
comes at them from the enveloping fog,
the shadowy form of a Joppa priest,
“I am Rosmophin, and I bring you good tidings.” —

 “We are gone, priest! You did not see us here,
and we did not see you. It is bad luck
to chatter and make idle conversation
on the place where the Romans turn men to corpses.” —

They turn to leave; the priest takes hold of shoulders
and spins them back. “You are not finished, fools!
I have come from the court, where I did hear
of great and coming judgments of the day. You men

shall be sent right back up here if you go home now.
Make haste. Take pick and shovel. The hill groans
for another cross.” — “Old man, we are done.
We have dug two holes as we were ordered.” —
The priest points down. — “Now dig a third one in between.”

 

 

Blackbirds and Mice

by Brett Rutherford

When they were grown and old
it seemed a dream to them,
or an oft-repeated
fairy-tale, so real, so
many times retold it seemed
as though they lived it through.

All dressed in dun color,
children, drilled in stillness
by the elders’ warnings —
be quiet as mice, swift
as the flying bird a-light.
Speak not a word, or wolves
might catch and eat you up!

The game they played was called
“Blackbirds and Mice.” Each would
repeat those syllables
at night like a bed-time prayer,
a mantra in the dentist’s chair,
until they no longer remembered
what language they said it in.

Huddled in straw in a hay-truck,
they rode without a cry
or whimper. The game was,
once they were led on out
to a small and dark opening
squared in by timbers,
the game was: you are mice.

Each mouse-child was given
a tiny crust of bread.
The tall figure ahead of you
is the Mouse-King himself.
His light will go on before you.
Follow it until you come
to the mouse-hole’s exit.
Eat breadcrumbs along the way
and say to yourselves,
We are mice … just tiny mice.
Bread-crumbs we nibble
as quietly we march.
It may be dark around.
Follow the light ahead
to come out the other side.

Children too big to be mice
were taken to a hillside
where they were turned into blackbirds.
Up, up the green hill they went,
(not flying, for none knew how),
led by two parent birds,
wings fluttering — hard to see
as it was not yet dawn,
dark figures up and over,
helping one another
they scrambled silently.
No one spoke, for fear of owls,
and ever-watching hawks.

Bird flock up and over
on tiny bird-feet, up and over
the green hillock to a warm hut.
Porridge and warm milk
was served by a red-faced lady.
The mice had already arrived,
coal dust and soot all over them.
The Mouse King, beaming,
stood in the back and drank beer.

And this is how they all
remembered it:
“Blackbirds and Mice,”
(or “Mice and Blackbirds”?)
in a game of silence.

When they were grown and old
they went back to the old country,
were shown the coal-mine entry
so small it seemed made for dwarves,
peeked at the way in, then on
the hill’s other side, the way out.

They climbed the alpine meadow
where nuns had led the blackbirds,
habits fluttering, to the cottage
where they had breakfasted.
It was all real: the German mine,
the German hill, the Swiss cottage.

In 1940, they were mice and blackbirds.
Most never saw their parents again.
Some home-towns bombed, no longer existed.
Blackbirds and Mice, they learned
new words, but never forget
the all-stakes game of silent flight.

The Secret of the Lake

 

by Brett Rutherford

Edinboro Lake, PA 

Day after day the sodden sky refills the lake, quenches the thirsty graveyard with migrant tears returning to the eye that wept them.

The used and tattered rainclouds come here like derelicts, like old dogs homing, revisiting one place — one secret lake which has berthed all waters (sea to sky to drawing mountain peak in flash of storm-drop —  this unassuming kettle of liquid clouds, gray-black beneath   the lidded heavens, shimmers at night  under the nodding Dipper,  the stars that empty it  of excess rainfall.

Now I come back to you, wait for respite of thunder, tread mud, walk flooded grass to the neglected graveyard, hark to the wind waves at your overfilled edge, the lapping song of your careworn banks, the hollow silence of your glacier-ground heart.

Elms and maples stand sentry. The ground is a riot of toppled tombstones, limbs torn by gale or lightning thrust, fence pickets torn off by age or vandals. The winds — or cautious townsmen —  have removed the old gray trunk that hoarded the shore like a sentinel (how its unmoving spindle arms alarmed the midnight visitor! how ravens and owls perched there to read the runes of the waveforms, the prophecy of wind and season! how poets and lovers sought it, the artist’s brush absorbed it as silhouette defining the lake beyond!)

I miss that tree. If one of the graves should vanish I would not miss it so much as that withered guardian.

It was the life work of a living thing, an epic of cambium in heartwood. Its wisdom was sublimated from soil, drunk from the lake of all waters, tapped from the abundance of sunlight, shielded from frost and lightning fire. It made itself sculpture, transcended its own passing, a defiant singularity, useless, unwanted, beautiful.

I shed my clothes to wade in the lake, letting the chill-cold waters accept me, sinking until the rippled plane of water licks at my shoulders, pacing with caution the rubble and sand of the lakebed. Not for a decade have I touched these waters, communed with the throwaway songs of the bullfrogs, the chirl of crickets, the paper-thin presence of curious insects, the nudge of fishes at my knees, the velvet black flurry and sonar symphony of the bats.

Cars hiss by on the distant roadway. House lights blink out. Water goes lull, takes on the hues of blueberries ripening — black and gray and Prussian blue.  The loudest of sounds  is the breath in my lungs, my voice as I call to you, lake of my youth: Remember me.

I too have come back to this navel of the world, this womb of the waters, this quencher of age and weariness.

Finally, your secret is revealed to me in God’s Eye weave of the thread of time:

The Eries came here for a winter festival, carried a gourd with the old year’s sadness, weighted it with stone, canoed and dropped it at your quiet center,  singing—

Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows — Heed not the crane, the fish, the deceitful song of the serpent — Heed us, mother of tears and rivers. We bring you a gourd, the gourd our ancestors taught us to make. Surely you are hungry, O Lake. We have come many days to offer it,  suffered such dangers to please you!

Calmly the lake accepted the present. The gourd sank fast and never returned. In silence, the men returned to the shore, banked their canoes and shouted with glee:

Jiyathontek! O Konneahti! Onenh, wete-wenna-keragh-danyon! Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows! Today we have made the signs. Again you ate the gourd and the stone. You did not know the gourd was hollow. You did not ask what was in it! Do not inquire, O Lake our mother.  We have promised never to tell you!

The gourd had passed a year in the longhouse. Each mother who lost an infant held it until the stream of her tears had dried. The father who watched the forest trail for the sight of the hunting party clenched it and wept for his eldest son. (They spoke of wolves at the council fire.)

In years of war or famine the gourd was heavy. Women put beads or locks of hair inside it, stained it with rust and blueberry paint. Feeble ones took it when their memory failed; it calmed the mad to sleep beside it.

Unburdened now of the Gourd of Sorrows, the Eries leave the forgiving lake, wash off their paint, their red-brown faces young with laughter and courage, their eyes as bright as the ardent sun, their strong legs running, running.

 

Maker of Stones

 

by Brett Rutherford

     After Magritte and for Barbara A. Holland

So many years of war,
of plagues and masks,
of fluctuating identity —
we all live now
in Magritte canvases
where anything can happen
and does, and anyone might turn
from flesh into solid granite. 

Has all New England
dropped all its glacial
detritus of a sudden
onto Manhattan? What gives
with all this geology?

You, of all people,
a slant-wise Medusa,
seem able to summon stones,
rock-hurler, caller-up
of hidden pebbles,
summoner of quarry blocks
as easy as hailing a cab. 

Almost without a thought
you are one of those poets
whose thoughts reshape the city.
For each one of your silences,
as we stroll through the Village
some quarry leaves off
another oblong obstacle
to reasonable walking.

Blithely you move forward,
while I must up-and-over
a never-ending hike-trail.

 Is the coast now smooth in Maine?
Are Vermont’s fields
now friendly to the plow
since all the impediments
have come on south?

 I am used by now
to the gravel you hurl
as periods; the shards
of gneiss that mark
your exclamations
(thank goodness they are few);

 but the small boulders
that pile around us
in the outdoor cafe
each time you leave a sentence
unfinished, are good
for no one but the pigeons.
I am not sure the waiter
will even find us again.

 The chalkless slate slab
you put up in front of us
is good for privacy
when a Jehovah’s Witness
comes leaflet-laden
with Biblical boredom;

 but it is all too much
for those of us unwise
in the ways of labyrinths
or masonry, inept
at making the rocks go
where they will serve
some purpose.

 When I go home,
I find my friend Steven petrified,
stiff as a Pharaoh
on a basalt throne.
The bowl of apples are marbleized;
whatever he had cooked
is dust on a plate of sandstone.
What am I going to do with him?

 And now some castle,
which huddled squat
on some peak of the Pyrenees,

hangs like the Goodyear blimp
just over Central Park,
and the stones of the Ramble
decide to evacuate vertically,
rock-root and trees and all
to form a hedge around it.

 Was this your doing, too?
Living as you do, one foot
in the surreal, you smile at this.
I guess you expect a ladder,
at some point, descending,
and an engraved invitation
from whomever it is up there
who is still flesh-and-blood.

 “Imagine the view!” you tease me.
“I wonder what they wear,
and from what century
their customs derive.” 

While that aberrant hulk
hangs like a dream-balloon
for your discourse
with air and lap-tongued clouds,
with whomever you choose as company
for your non-Newtonian discourse,

I stand below, confound with physics
what my eye receives,
and wait, with folded arms
its eventual fall.

 

Ruins

 by Brett Rutherford

     Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Passing the gutted neighborhood I think of you.
Your soul is that abandoned factory whose panes
lie shattered on its concrete floors. The pigeons roost
inside the eaves where keystone — and conscience — once held
the bricks into a nobler form. A high fence surrounds
you needlessly, braided with thorns. Yet any would-be
trespasser can see the sky clean through your vacant
casements. Unhindered rain comes through the roof and makes
dim lakes, unrippled glass in which your machinery
hunches, islands in an archipelago of rust.

Your doors hang twisted, the locks no longer deceiving
the feral packs who come to spray obscenities
upon the inner lining of your empty skull.
Rats nest in every orifice and gnaw at you.
The pink squeal of baby rodents fills the raw night;
your ivy beard clogs with their comings and goings.
Today your name. inscribed on the weathered billboard
totters face down upon the veined macadam lot;
today the pimpled scavengers shall peel your walls
of the last of copper and brass and chrome and wire.
They make off in a pickup through a brazen gap
in your fenced perimeter. Love, no one laments
your debasement — like Zion of old, you are stripped
bare of your finery by an unforgiving god.
One last time I pass you in the Boston-bound bus,
remembering vaguely how I once thought I loved you
before the empire of your fatal charm collapsed,
before your edifice of seeming goodness dropped,
before your calamitous default — oh, how you fell! —
no one has wanted you since (small comfort to me)
as you languish for unpaid taxes of the heart.

 

At the Walls of Troy

 by Brett Rutherford

Have you found Troy? Colossal walls, impregnable,

once fashioned here to rise and fall a dozen times,

fell for their last, gate opened in fatal error.

Do your hear clash of arms, the din of bronze on bronze

(oh deadly iron, you slept then, as yet unor’d

beneath the blood-red earth, unknown to Hephaestus!)

How the chariots rolled, crushing the spent arrows,

driving the gore-spewn breastplates and skull’d helmets down

into the mire and muck of the ungrass’d field,

rolled right on in, to triumph after sleight’s success!

Dare you to stand without a shudder, where a god —

— Yea! even a goddess — reeled and bled out ichor

as Diomedes thrust and thrust impudent metal

with the clear sight of reason — the perfect warrior

granted of all men the vision to mark and wound

the very gods themselves as they sat invisible

beside their chosen heroes. Apollo stopped him:

woe to the hand that ever again hurled a spear

at an Olympian! If ever a warrior

asks why the gods should condone war, avert your eyes!

Did you find that high parapet from which the Greeks

hurled Priam’s last infant son to a bone-crush ruin

so that no son’s son would one day raid fair Hellas?

Do cries still echo here of the wail of the Trojan

women — some doomed to the swift sword or self-murder

vainly offering their jewelry as ransom —

some chosen, war’s prize, for transport and servitude,

already-raped captives whose usurp’d wombs erase

the name of Troy? A place with all its women gone

is a place for dogs and vultures, without a name.

Have you found Troy? ’Mid all this dust and ruin,

can you raise one ghost from all the thousand warships

to ask him the why of this past and present misery,

the cause for fighting and dying so far from home?

Agamemnon hears you not. Menelaus went pale

when stories of the great war were told in Sparta.

Some of that scattered gray ash might be Patroclus.

You, with bowed head, recited from Homer and wept

as ghosts gave shout and answered why they went:

To see again the radiant face of Helen.

8/21/2021