Waiting for Someone to Come Along (for Kiev)

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from “Высока луна Господня”  by Fyodor Sologub

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
They have all gone
to the underground shelters,
so it is hard for me.
Nothing to do, my food quite gone,
I am exhausted today.

The old houses in this narrow lane
curve in upon themselves and stare
each into the other’s windows.
We all peer out. Not one
of the others dares to bark.
The heat is off, the lights
have been extinguished.
Alone and bored and freezing,
we take our cues from the moon
that watches and says nothing.

The street, swept clean
of children, bottles, litter,
is empty and dead.
Nothing rattles about
to make it worth our while
to set up a collective howl.

Where have they all gone?
Why did they look at the sky
like frightened rabbits
when hawks are around?
There are no footsteps, nothing
crunches into the newly
fallen snow. I sniff the street
with alarm: nothing at all,
not even a scent
from the edge of a boot-print.

Waking or sleeping, how can we do
our jobs if no one is there? The quick step
of the hurried-home, the sly tread
of the house-thief, the happy stride
of the returning traveler: the signs
for which we live and what we warn of —
just who are we waiting for
when no one is here to tell?

Hours ago an unmarked truck
went by, and then a tank,
and then the sky lit up.
Who could we tell? What was
the point of putting up a ruckus?
Were those who drove by
without regarding us friends,
or enemies? Who knows?

I have found my way out

through an open coal chute.
I am the only one, it seems

who can come and go at will.

Out here in the cold I am alone.
The eaves are little shelter
when the wind grows cold.
This cannot go on. I must do
something! Something!
I shall sit beneath this window
and howl my lungs out.

God’s moon shines on high
above the still and silent city.
Sadness torments me.
Soon I shall be too weak
to continue this alarm
about nothing and for no one
in particular. What is wrong with me?

Please break the silence!
Sisters, sisters, come to your windows.
Part the curtains with curious snouts.
No one is coming! We have been
left behind! Look! The sky explodes
with yellow and red flashes!
Bark, sisters, bark at the moon!

They Killed My Russia (1918)

 

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Fyodor Sologub, 1918

They have killed my Russia already,
and placed her in an unmarked grave.
Here I must choke back my weeping,
feign happiness amid the evil crowd.

Sleep in your grave, my Motherland,
until, in some long-awaited spring,
lightning will shoot from sunken loam,
and in a flood, our dreams will live.

How long must these funereal vigils
go on, disguised as celebrations?
How can we not betray our sadness
as the parade of triumph rolls on by?

What Can One Do?

by Brett Rutherford

What can one do against the tide of war?
For starters, one can write a thousand poems.
If soldiers stopped to write, each his epic,
there would be no need for bloody battles
as all the small deaths of The Iliad
are told again and anew in poems;
if sailors lay back in hammocks languidly
and counted out sonnet beats on fingers,
sleek submarines would stall, submerging not
nor even leaving their darkened harbors;
if the Seals and Marines were tasked with Greek,
to translate Anakreon’s erotics,
the boy-crazed sighing of Petronius,
or the athletic odes of high Pindar,
then verses they wrote would work themselves out
in indolent acts of one-another-
worship, the weapons all quite forgotten.

If everyone wrote each a thousand poems
there would be no time for conspiracies,
and the deer would go unkilled, the students
unmurdered in their high-school classrooms, all
manner of crimes would be but sublimate
inside poetic narratives of strife.
Each to her own Utopia, the dreamers
take to pen and keyboard — no one is slain
to prove a finer point of cold theory.

Blank verse? Free-verse? Epic? It matters not.
Saga or ballad or lordly sonnet?
Any will do. Get on with it. Send all
to your dull senators and congressmen;
dare them to answer you only in verse.

My manifesto made, my duty done.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine more to go!

The Problem With Utopias

by Brett Rutherford

It was all fine and good
in the land of milk and honey.
Everyone had the same religion
and worshiped the same elder god,
shaggy and jealous as he was,
short-tempered with plague and flood,
until the young men, tempted, strayed,
into the arms of “strange women.”

Each time a holy man or woman
led hundreds away
to some hidden valley,
life was perfect, as though
all minds were of common accord,
until the children born there
had quite enough of Paradise,
craving flesh-pots and pyramids.
Utopia is not genetic; in fact,
each generation must make its own.

The worker’s paradise
looked fine on paper, way back
in the soot-chimney gloom of ‘48.
No matter that half the population
would have to be murdered at last
to give the other half a dull life

of gray and anonymous equality.

Galt’s Gulch and lumberjack liberty
appealed to many, ego-proud.
It made us feel good to be worthy,
and smart, and fully in tune
with the provisos of absolute logic.
Like Christ who pushed off
the ledge of Heaven,
all of Satan’s bad angels,
Ayn Rand
would hurl the beggars and moochers
into the nullity they so well deserved.
It wasn’t really a philosophy,
and sure as hell it knew no history,
but it was a solipsist Utopia smug
on top of a coming dystopia.

The worst Utopia of all
is the pig-selfish Heaven
the TV evangelists shovel out
as dullard’s dollars flow in
to support their personal fortunes
and offshore bank accounts.

This Heaven is a pig-sty of desire
amid perpetual harp-playing
and off-key singing, a sky
where squalling babies and lost pets
forever seek their former owners,
smug Paradise of only the saved
with choice seats
to look down into Hell.

Meanwhile, the real world
is a Utopia of Things
whose makers rule
like Byzantine Emperors.

Hail to the Six Treasures:
guns and drugs, cars and girls,
tobacco-death, sports mania.
No Utopia without pizza!
No Heaven without women
waiting to be grabbed!
No Paradise without guns,
and something quivering
to be stalked and shot.
Heaven is a big cigar,
hog-mouth open for the next slice
with lots of pepperoni,
and all of them, all men of course,
are all the spitting image
of Tom Brady.

At least the animals are not
the least bit interested
in making a Utopia.
They live in the present,
and that is all there is.

The Orphaned Vase

by Brett Rutherford

Two decades or more I have studied it:
that double-dragon-handled vase
from my New York hauntings.
Bought from a Chinese store
about to shut down forever,
its unsold vases stacked,
dust-covered orphans
that had never found a home.

Today I regard it with new eyes
and undertake to learn its origins,
and what the wriggling floral shapes
and tangled leaves can tell me.

Amid the leaves are Treasures:
a thick square book in a silken cord,
a checker board awaiting two players,
two rice-paper scrolls tied up
blank for calligraphy to come,
and two rhinoceros horns
predicting happiness
for the vase’s owner.

It was intended, no doubt,
to be a young scholar’s first vase,
its carmine glaze the blush
of a young man’s ardor,
its unknown, ardent flowers
all petals open to the sun.

It is all good omens, but no one came
to the old shop on Mott Street
to carry it off; no scholar sipped
his oolong tea and wrote poems
in the cheer of its good karma.

Close scrutiny reveals
some hint of the reasons why:
one of the dragon handles
is missing the monster’s snout.
Some accident — a fall, a ricochet
of a bandit’s bullet, broke off
this beast’s ability
to snort a blowtorch back
at a would-be attacker.

One also sees
the whole vase is a-tilt.
It leans some five degrees
off vertical, so doomed to sit
like someone whose leg
is shorter than the other,
a tipsy vase just ready
to take a tumble.

It is a century old, I guess.
It is lonely for its maker,
for the fine-haired brush
that painted it, for the wheel
on which it was cast lopsided.

It comes from a kiln
that exists no more. One day,
a Japanese bomber took sight
at the Wude Sheng factory
and all was blown
to smithereens.

Thou, sad vase,
thou, snoutless dragon,
thou, limping, tilted vessel,
orphan of war and history.

A Millennium of Printing

 by Brett Rutherford

Those of us old enough to have touched and used metal type have a sense of the astonishing printing progress made in the last half-century. The all-digital generations following us will have grown up with digital cameras, desktop publishing, and instant Internet access to vast libraries of “virtual” books. To them, the history of printing will be quaint and charming. Its only inheritance may be the traditional esthetics that distinguish fine design and printing from semi-literate junk. People will know that printing looked better in the “good old days,” but they won’t know why.

            Our printing descendants, if they visit a museum displaying printing presses and typesetting machinery, might marvel at how printers, at the turn of the 20^th century, still rubbed greasy ink on raised metal type and pressed it against paper, much as Johannes Gutenberg had done in the 1450s.

            The chronology of printing is fascinating, with its long letterpress “stone age,” followed by a burst of 19^th Century inventions such as the rotary press, the Linotype machine, the halftone screen, and photoengraving. The triumph of offset lithography after World War II, however, started a revolution in invention that is now reaching its apogee — with innovations coming so fast that the industry can barely keep up with them.

            The printing industry, even as late as the 1970s, would still have been recognizable to a printer of 100 years earlier. The industry we are becoming in the post-2000 world, though, will be one the old-fashioned printer could not even imagine. We are already at the point where we can get a book or magazine to a printing press without consuming any materials such as film, chemicals, proofs, or plates. In less than two decades, the book or magazine itself will become a  “virtual” product, with readers printing out text passages or color images only if they want to keep or share them. Coffee table art books will transfer images to virtual paintings on our walls. Virtual magazines will have moving, talking advertisements, and celebrity interviews that can be heard as well as read. Libraries will be accessible 24 hours a day, with on-line reading/printing of public domain texts. 

            We really can’t even imagine where it will all lead, but all these things are steps along the way to the inventor’s ideal: imaging machinery that has no moving parts, never wears out, and uses no “consumables” other than energy.

 

How We Got Here

            Gutenberg, Senefelder, Mergenthaler and other inventors who moved us toward our all-digital age might be startled to see where the industry they steered has gone. Most of the inventors of the past sought a short-term goal, and envisioned the profits they would make because their machines could copy words and pictures faster, cheaper and better.

            We can look back on certain inventions and say, with some certainty, that they mattered a great deal in liberating printing from the days of scribes to the days of ink dots and pixels. Here are the creative landmarks that I believe have mattered most to the printing industry in the millennium now ended, a timeline of inventions and “firsts.”

            AD 800. Books are produced in quantity in Korea and Japan from hand-carved woodblocks.

            1041. Books are printed in China from movable ceramic clay type. Although books are printed and widely distributed by Imperial order, Europeans remain unaware of Chinese printing methods for almost half a millennium.

            1221. Books are printed in China from moveable type made from hand-carved wood blocks. As many as 30,000 separate Chinese characters were required!

            1453 to 1456. Gutenberg’s Bible. The first finished, complete European book proving that cast metal type could be used to produce a Bible comparable to the best work of scribes and illuminators. By the year 1500, there would be ten million printed books in Europe. By 1507, the Church began censoring some printed books, banning others. A few printers are ordered strangled or burned at the stake.

            1495. In Venice, Aldus Manutius is the first successful printer-publisher. He uses elegant, readable typefaces, woodcut illustrations, and smaller page sizes to produce affordable copies of Greek and Latin classics.

            1535. First printing press in the New World is set up in Mexico.

            1550. Wood engravings are the predominant method of producing illustrations, but intaglio engravings in copper gain appeal. The tradition of “multi-process” books, with text produced by one method and illustrations printed on separate sheets or signatures by another method, takes shape.

            1639. First printing in North America -- “The Freeman’s Oath” in Massachusetts.

            1725. The first stereotype plate is cast from a metal type form in Scotland. This is the first instance of a permanent “plate” apart from handset type. This meant that the original type could be redistributed and re-used. The method was not widely used, though, until much later in the 18^th century.

            1796. Alois Senefelder develops the art of stone lithography, printing from a flat, grained stone surface. This is the predecessor of offset lithography.

            1800. America’s first “coffee table” art book is published, a book of hand-colored engraved plates of “The City of Philadelphia.”

            1806. Machine-made paper becomes available for the first time, thanks to the invention of the Fourdrinier paper machine—the process still used today for papermaking. Before this time, all paper was hand-made.

            1814. The London Times uses steam power to print newspapers on a cylindrical press.

            1829. First typewriter is patented in Detroit, Michigan. Typewriters capable of working at the same speed as writing longhand would be not developed until the 1870s.

            1835 to 1841. W.H. Fox Talbot develops the techniques for making photographic negatives, and from them, any number of positive copies. Modern photography is born, with a profound impact on printing. The discovery that light-sensitive materials could capture and preserve toned images of real life was a bombshell. Until then, only a trained artist could represent reality, and only using hand tools and complicated techniques to represent tone and shadow.

            1840. First paper made from wood pulp instead of rag fibers. Bookworms started the march to extinction since they couldn’t eat paper made from wood pulp.

            1844. Richard Hoe’s first letterpress using an image carrier (stereotype) cylinder.

            1850. First stone lithographic press with automatic inking and impression cylinders. Lithographs rapidly became the principal means to produce posters and low-cost art reproductions.

            1860. First rotary gravure printing on paper in France. Gravure would one day become a printing giant, used for Sunday supplements, catalogs, and long-run magazines.

            1864. The halftone screen is invented. For the first time, a printing press could reproduce a photograph, simulating all its gradations of tone using dots of various sizes.

            1865. First web press built by William Bullock, with rotary letterpress image carrier and impression cylinders. Web printing is off and running.

            1868. First rotary litho press using zinc plates.

            1870. In-line folding machines fold sheets into signatures as they come off press. Laid-off New York City bindery girls, in desperation, become dance hall performers.

            1872. Photoengraving of letterpress plates is introduced. Engravings of halftones or line drawings can now be printed on the same form with metal type.

            1875. Carl Klitsch develops photochemical engraving for gravure printing.

            1879. Thomas Edison invents the electric lamp, with a profound impact on American culture and industry. The electrification of cities and factories means the end of reliance on steam and human power for printing machinery.

            1886. Ottmar Mergenthaler unveils the Linotype machine, the first successful device to automate typesetting. The Linotype, one of the greatest inventions of all time, cast individual, justified lines of metal type, using matrices that dropped from an overhead compartment. After being used to cast the type in molten lead, the matrices were automatically redistributed. Productivity was 500% greater than setting type by hand. His invention would sweep the world and would be the dominant method of typesetting for more than 60 years.

            1891. Tolbert Lanston introduces the Monotype typesetter.

            1892. First color printing using three-color halftone screens.

            1904. Offset lithography is invented. The act of printing “second hand” from a cylindrical rubber blanket instead of by direct contact with the image carrier had profound implications – so profound that offset, in less than half a century, would become the dominant printing process.

            1930. First four-color offset press is installed. American “photolithographers” would spend decades perfecting the four-color printing process.

            1942. Magnetic tape introduced. Although it took decades for cheap, recordable/ erasable magnetic media to impact the graphic arts, today we rely on it to store all our jobs.

            1951. First color television. A technology that would lead to color computer monitors and the whole world of color perceived as RGB.

            1954. Phototypesetting begins with the introduction of the Harris Fotosetter. During the next 20 years, phototypesetting became faster and cheaper, and the typesetting industry came into its glory days as entrepreneurs bought the new technology. Metal typesetting was all but obsolete by 1970.

            1957. Helvetica typeface introduced. A dark day for printing.

            1960. Invention of the laser. No single invention since the Linotype has had more impact on the graphic arts industry. The laser’s ability to focus a microscopic dot at high energy levels has brought it into use in all kinds of imaging devices – and the end is not in sight.

            1962. First Xerox copier. The copier would come to dominate the black and white printing market within two decades.

            1964. Introduction of word processing systems. The existence of text in stored media instantly presented both challenge and opportunity to typesetters and printers. By 1975, word processors became affordable standalone units with disk storage. The first inklings here of putting the prepress into the hands of the customer – another trend that isn’t over yet.

            1968. First all-digital typesetter. No more film fonts, since fonts are now “software.”

            1972. First color copiers. A harbinger that “color on demand” would one day be the customer’s credo.

            1980. The desktop laser printer. Within 20 years, there would be a desktop printer accessible to almost anyone with a computer.

            1981. Introduction of PostScript by Adobe, Inc. , the first device-independent file format for text and graphics. Today’s wildly popular PDF format is an offshoot of PostScript.

            1984. Apple Computers introduces the Macintosh, the first computer whose operating system included on-screen type and graphics.

            1985. Desktop publishing is introduced to Mac users in Aldus Pagemaker, and to PC users with Xerox Ventura Publisher. For the first time, ordinary computer users are able to lay out complete publications and see them represented on screen exactly as they will print.

            The 1990s. Well, you’ve lived through them. An explosion of new technology, at plummeting prices. Cheap color printers, cheap scanners, 50-cent type fonts, huge PC disk drives, the Internet, digital presses, wide format printing – yegods, where will it all lead us?

The Admonition

 by Brett Rutherford

Two chock-a-block gingerbread Victorians
stand jowl-to-jowl, identical, one brown,
one red with paint a-peeling, otherwise
who could distinguish one from another?
So, the same architect built two of them
on plots too small: one narrow passageway,
set in perpetual shadow between.
I enter the cool shadow to confirm
the same bay windows jutting hopefully
where never a glimmer of light came in.
The crusty pavement underfoot, the coo
of pigeons give this a cave-like aura.

The realtor ushers me to the porch,
a deep-shaded, one where once, on gliders,
they sat of an evening with lemonade
and talked the news of an innocent age.
Inside, it is rather a shambles.
Wood-paneled parlor, fireplace, French doors
to a large dining-room, all very nice
but the antique wallpaper is undone
and the mummy-powder of plaster dust
and the hairy fringe of rampant mildew.

Upstairs is a warren of bedrooms. “Sons,
five of them, were all raised here,” I am told.
“So everything is all the worse for wear.
After the boys were grown and gone, it was
college boys rooming here, year after year.”
“I need a little time alone,” I tell
my guide, “to get the house’s true atmosphere.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” the realtor says.
“It’s quiet, if that’s what you want to have.
Next door it’s just a husband and wife, and
but for Sunday no one ever sees them.”
“Church people?” I ask. She nods. “Old-fashioned
folks who mind their own business, I’m sure.
Well now, just take your time. I’ll wait out there.”

Up I went to third floor: more rooms, with slant
of ceiling but plenty of good windows.
The window just across reveals nothing
of the furnishings of the quiet neighbors.
Ah, but there is a paper sign, taped up
and in neat lettering admonishing
some former student tenant: DO NOT SLEEP …
I cannot make out the rest, the letters
bled with rain leaking into the cracked pane.

From the adjacent room, I spy another
warning sign: Bitte schlafen Sie nicht mit …
the bottom torn. The last room facing in
toward the stern neighbors is painted black.
I imagine the neighbors up at night,
their Bibles always open to Leviticus,
worse yet, to Numbers and Deuteronomy,
hand-lettering their little sermonettes
to the blaspheming and drunk college boys.

I go to the bathroom’s smaller window
and see across to their well-lit chamber:
a claw-foot bathtub, a shiny white sink.
Between the tub and the window, I see
a palisade of two-by-fours, as though
they had started to build a new drywall,
but later abandoned the idea.
Taped to it and facing my view, a sign
of more recent vintage cautions me:
PLEASE DO NOT SLEEP WITH MRS. KELLY.

I clamber up to the attic to see
if the widow’s watch is accessible.
It is! Up into it I climb. I dream
of sitting up here with notebook in hand,
surveying full half of the seacoast town
and even out into the great harbor.

You can imagine my astonishment
to see, within the matching widow’s watch
a figure regarding me eye to eye,
a beckoning fair one whose handkerchief
waves me a friendly greeting. Below her,
the thing to which she points her lily hand
languidly, is a ladder some roofer
abandoned there conveniently. With ease
it could connect one house to the other.
Her dark eyes summon me. Oh, Mrs. Kelly!

Cometary Love

by Brett Rutherford

My solitude is astronomical.
One time I loved, I loved a comet-star:
once seen, once held, once even bonded to,
he flew away to some outer orbit.
Long is the wait until he comes again;
chances are good that I’ll be dead before
earthward swings his next perihelion.

But now that Hubble’s eye has caught me up,
I learn that things are more dire than I thought:
I am a comet, too, not rooted to earth,
not anywhere near the warm small orbits
of the inhabited worlds. My folly
was to lock my ice-shagged eyes on someone
just as cold, remote and inarticulate.
We each mistook the sun’s fire as our own
as we grazed by one another, flirting
with borrowed heat and false radiation.

On earth, a double comet was double-doom
to tyrants and to religious zealots;
to us it was a candle-lit romance.
I thought you fled from me; you thought I fled.
Each in our own ellipse we sped away.
Now I am told just what the odds might be
that we might ever come so close again,
or even — just imagine that — collide.

Not for an eternity of orbits
will such a thing occur. In fact, the sun
is on its own death-calendar. In flame
and supernova flash all will be burnt.

Whatever made me think I was a man,
and that I, a poet, a flaming star
could woo and win with words and rapt glances?
Who could, with sonnets, defeat gravity?