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.