Ancien Regime

A reading of Molière, Jean François de Troy, about 1728

by Brett Rutherford

She had at least five names.
We never knew them all.
Look at the paintings:
three days at least to sell
at auction such masterworks.
Like bees, the antiquarian
booksellers descend
upon her famed library.
A shame: the furniture alone
is a museum of its time.

It was as though
she descended from Olympus
with the wealth of Midas.
She loaned pocket money to princes.
Most cheated her, but one,
ascending the throne, gave her

a ducal palace. Her salons
were legendary, wine cellars
incomparable. Composers knelt
by her soft couch, and played
her famed three-manual
harpsichord. She laughed
at religion and all its follies.
She was high up
on the Grand Inquisitor's list
of those to exterminate.

Within four walls
of marble and onyx,
she calmed philosophers
and statesmen, sped verse
along its way, and spent
to the last ducat the wealth
that had come to her.
Praise rolled off her;
gossip's goblins
gave her no pain.
She never married,
was no one's mistress.

Who could have guessed?

Her tomb says just
"Rebecca,
Rachel and Solomon's
daughter."

The White Lady

by Brett Rutherford

Part Four of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

And now I turn, and facing me,
the polar opposite of the old invader
and his dragon visage, there stands
tall as an oak, The White Lady.

I see, again, the black-hued rats,
how dark they clot the landscape,
blotting with sable hues the fields of wheat,
spoiling the grape, and the apple harvest.

She sings with flute-like tone, “Away! Away!”
The rats stop. She waves her hand
toward the River Tyne below, to where
the rich groom’s yacht
     has shouldered out the fisher-boats.

“Away! Away!” she cries,
and the rats surge up below us,
flooding the gangplank to vanish
into the yacht’s interior. As fast
as they had come, the dark wave
of pestilence thins out, is gone.
Packed they must be in every inch
of space below the decks, all but
invisible steerage passengers,
bound like their predecessor rodents
to teeming Manhattan. “Away! Away!”
she sings again, and all
are gone and still.

                                I swoon at this,
and without knowing how, I find myself
again in the company of one
whose feet are lily-pads, who then
returned me to the wedding hall.

The bride is lovely. None seem
to notice that her pristine gown
is made entirely of small, white mice.
The groom’s cloak seems full
of raven wings and clinging martlets.
Beaks, snouts, and claws reach out
at wedding cake and goblets.
All is as planned, and as my
crisply engraved invite presaged.
Guests come in the guise of animals.
As merry it is as a Furry convention.
Though no one is drunk, the dancing
grows more and more wild as sun
sinks and a silver moon rises.

Who said that Northumberland is stern,
has never been to a Robson-Rutherford Wedding!

 

 

March 3, 2023, from a preceding night’s dream.

Lord Rutherford's Castle

 

by Brett Rutherford

Part Three of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

As crowds flow past and into the banquet hall,
I find myself alone. The barred door
of the castle keep, bronze studded with iron,
forbids my passage. I knock
my umbrella against its dark shielding.
A hollow booming echoes back — I dread
that Lord Rutherford, my cousin drear,
as much averse to weddings as to funerals,
will come running in his bathrobe,
or that some chain-mailed retainer
will pull the vast door ajar and menace
me with the very sword we brought
into this land from Flanders. But no,
my knock presumptuous just fades away.

I spy a lesser door, and stones
whose curious hand-holds pose
a challenge like some Chinese puzzle box.
Somehow my hands know where
to put themselves. With ease,
one cornerstone pulls out; the door
on a spring’d hinge just opens itself,
and in and up I go. My feet
know when to tread, and where
exactly one must side-step so as
to miss a plummeting to brain-dash.
As quick as a rabbit racing, I find
myself at the castle’s high precipice,
standing on checkerboard flagstones.

A rude stone sculpture, crumbling
and eaten away by ivy, rears up,
half-man, half-dragon, but faces in,
as though to guard from eyes the view —

And what I see! Oh, words
for once have almost failed me.
A horizon high, impossibly so,
two rivers meeting, and on
its level island, white and gold,
three towers by time unchanged:

a cathedral as new as on the day
it was completed, rainbow-hued
as its multi-colored windows
gleam brighter than the sun
without; a great, good hall
to shelter the merchant arts and serve
workman, lords, scholars and clerks;
and higher than both, a castle
beyond the dream of fairy-tales
with trees and hanging gardens blessed,
a place of neither strife nor war.

Rats at the Wedding

 by Brett Rutherford

Part Two of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

I have come
for the Robson-Rutherford wedding.
The inn’s last room is mine,
secured by my distant-cousin status.
My room overlooks the Tyne.
The castle beyond is all a-stir,
the grand hall packed with visitors.

Yet the old keep and its twisted turret
is barred and closed.
     Lord Rutherford forbids
the tread of curious idlers
upon its steep unbannistered steps,
windows unpaned; uneven-floored
the crenellated tower-top is, where
one might plummet to the very dungeon.

I pass a train depot and shelter
whose sign points out
the way to London, Edinburgh,
Paris, and Rome, though no one
seems to come or go
by either train or autobus. Indeed,
a colony of wharf-rats, obscenely fat
have taken residence on every bench
and nest in piles of yellow ticket stubs.

“Don’t mind them,” Lady Robson advises.
“As she is marrying an American,
the silly creature, we’ve drawn the rats.
Off to New York they go, and not
a moment too soon for Northumberland.”
This is an elder lady’s fantasy, I guess.

How such a Pied-Piper feat could be
accomplished was beyond my figuring.

Assuredly the rats are here for cake,
like all the distant relatives come on
with smiling insincerity and gifts
(white elephants that rotate fete to fete).

Rats, rice, and diamonds, the stuff
of weddings since ancient times.

A Gift of Daffodils

 by Brett Rutherford

Part One of "A Northumbrian Wedding"

1.

A Gift of Daffodils

“I was given the gift of daffodils.” —
“How sad,” I say. “So brief a bloom
despite the glory they bring for a day.” —
“Come see,” the old one, smiling, says.

She puts her apron aside and rises,
strutting the cobblestones on spindly legs.
Her feet, I see, end not in shoes
but wide-spread lily pads. Duck feet
could not be more sure of tread
as she led me to the shaded wall
beneath St. Cuthbert’s church. There,
tiny narcissus-daffodils peeped up.
“That’s fine,” said I, “but in a week
the petals fade and fall. Yon rose
blooms over and over again. Mistress,
I shall gift you a bed of roses.” —

“Nay, sir, with daffodils I stay,
for what I plant here, blazons
above.” Just then, as I looked up,
the organ pealed in all its octaves
and light filled from within
the ancient, stained-glass window,
not a saints suffering, or Christ a-cross,
but an endless vista of gold
and white athwart green spears,
twenty feet high and every inch
a portrait of exploding daffodils.

Woe to Bayonne, New Jersey

by Brett Rutherford

In my dreams last night,

I attempted to get

to Bayonne, New Jersey.

I do not drive. The road

to Bayonne has no sidewalks.

By train, by bus,

I had to get to Bayonne, New Jersey,

I have never been

to Bayonne, New Jersey.

Woe unto those who dwell

in Bayonne, New Jersey!

Bayonnis and Bayonettes,

your days are numbered!

Whom should I seek

in Bayonne, New Jersey?

Am I to rescue them

or am I the doom

they have dreaded

since the first Bayonne

sunrise greeted them?

Alas for Bayonne, New Jersey!

Do sandwich-sign men

tread the main streets

and announce my coming?

Are there churches

in Bayonne, New Jersey?

Do their bells peal

to warn the citizens

of my arrival? Hands

over eyes, hands over

the ears of the children,

hands reaching for guns,

is their defense adequate

against the moment

I cross the town line

and breathe deep

the chemical fragrance

of Bayonne, New Jersey?

Will ghost flames flare

at the old refinery?

Will the low howl

of tanker horns shake

the port of Bayonne?

The words I utter

will be their undoing.

I am worse

than an unwelcome

immigrant, more

dangerous than a scout

from an off-shore pirate

schooner. I, alone,

asking for nothing,

threaten all.

I have written a book.

Woe to Bayonne,

New Jersey!

Like

Comment

Share