By Night, She Is Mine

 by Brett Rutherford

     After Anonymous, from The Greek Anthology, v, 2

The whole town is on fire
over one wanton woman.
Purses are empty; the wives’
rainy-day treasuries
plundered; the son’s
patrimony in mortgage
to fill the greedy coffers
of one female. Sthenelais,
she calls herself. The rose
she fancies she smells like
is gilded with young men’s
ruin. I pass the arbor
where red and white blooms
entwine with fatal thorns
among them, and what
my nostrils detect
is not the attar of rose
but just a faint whiff
of well-oiled rutting.

Smiling, I pass her door,
and am not tempted.
All I require
is one long glance at her,
taking her in
from top to bottom, side
to side, curved just so,
and in my artist’s eye, all
has been captured there.

All I require
is my own firm bed,
and an all-too-familiar
vintage, and one dogless,
catless and riotless night,
and there she comes.
No need to attend
those silly conventions
of disrobing. Nude
she prefers to walk
in moonlight, the shortest way
from her lust-lubricated
chamber to my straw bed.

For every stroke
the town boys gave her,
she proffers ten my way,
my mattress afloat
among the jealous
constellations. She stays
till dawn. She laughs at me
and tells me not to pout
at my lack of fortune.
I have drawn her figure in air
and she rushes in to fill it.

No matter who calls, she tells me,
no matter how high or handsome
the face at her door, the moment
her lover nods off, she’ll scurry away
to our most secret marriage bed.

And who am I to merit such
attention from a famous beauty?
No one at all, really.
I have no wealth. No place is named
for any ancestor I care to name.
Lords of the town: I sweep your streets.
Scant are the coins you afford me.
Do I not see the comings and goings
at doors and garden-gates at dusk,
how many times and for how many
different men one door goes suddenly
ajar? Yet when I shed my thread-bare coat
and hang my torn hat behind the door,
I need but close my eyes. I am Paris,
and that most-coveted Sthenelais,
oh, Helen, if ever a woman were!

 

 

 

 

The Count

At the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve

 

by Brett Rutherford

From a cloud as thick as cotton
the egg-shaped face emerged.
It was not smooth, not white
but brown and when it spoke,
the wrinkles of millennia spread out
around its watchful, sparkling eyes.

Not once before did such a one
appear to me. The way was open.
No spirit guide preceded me,
and other than the riddle of my life
no puzzle was put before me,
and no monsters blocked the way.

“Poet,” he said, “do you know me?”
“I think I do. We have not met
but the word ‘ancestor’ comes to mind,
and through my father’s mother’s
mother we are of one blood.”

The egg-head nodded. “That will do.
I had a name, but I myself
     have forgotten it. I am glad
you are not afraid of me,
for those who bow and scrape
and mistake me for a god
are of no use to me — fools!”

“I do not mistake entities,
old and distinguished, for gods,”
I assured him. There was no fear.
A stone seat came up behind me.
I sat. Something like elbows
leaned forward from out the fog.
Soon we were eye-to-eye.

A bony hand, its fingers knobbed
with uncounted age, emerged
and held forth a giant femur bone,
remnant of some mastodon.
From end to end it was carved
with notches, some lines, some lines
with hooked curved above them.

“This is the count,” he told me.
"Notches on bone, and then behind me,
marks on stone, tens to hundreds,
hundreds to thousands,
one record passed along
and across this continent.

"We came from world’s roof,
from the fertile valleys,
the bamboo forests.
Nothing was ever enough.
Always, we moved onward.
Always, the beasts were chasing us.

“We slept in dank caves,
skin-covered huts, houses
of bark and wood.
Some places offered plenty,
other dank contagion
we learned to avoid.

"Evil there was:
the bite, the sting
of snake and scorpion;
the sudden storm,
the whirlwind, the quake
that leveled houses.

“We guessed that here no king
dared raise a palace,
how mounds and pyramids
alone endured
when the floods came
and sinkholes swallowed.
It was an angry place
that did not want us
to walk upon it, it seemed.
 

“Wild beasts consumed us;
some we consumed in turn.
The dog, the goat, the lamb
we held to us; the wolf,
the bear, the lion we drove
from us with spear and fire.

“To whom did this land belong?
the sly thief
     with the mask around his eyes?
the chattering squirrel?
the migrant birds in the open sky?

“Thousands of lakes,
     and hundreds of rivers
          with their tributaries
waited to welcome us.
No one was there. We saw
no other people until,
some ages later, our own
lost cousins came round
to find us again.”

“Ancestor,” I answered.
“We have guessed as much
from bones and shards
and bits of pottery. The woe
is that you left no poetry.”

He sighed. He waved
the giant bone again.
“The count,” he said.
“This is all I have to tell you.”

“But I cannot read this.”
His hand took mine and made
it trace the notches, one by one.
“The count,” he repeated.
“The count of what?”
“How many times the winter has come,
and the summer after it,
and the winter again,
since our first foot fell
on this vast and unpeopled land.
Our count, our claim,
our history.”

“But I cannot read this!” Against
my will my fingers ran
from end to end of the long fossil,
turning and touching another row,
another, and another.”

“The count!” he shouted at me,
his eyes imploring now. Faster
my fingers traced the carven lines,
faster and faster still, until —

It is a summer dawn. Upright I sit
in my modern bed. The birds
are about their business, the first
morning bus is at the corner,
announcing its destination.

I speak aloud the count of years
since the first man came
from far-off Asia
to make this empty land his own:

Forty-two thousand
seven hundred
and ten times
have winters given way
to summers since
the days of the Ancestors.

 

Communions

by Brett Rutherford

She kept count.

The day came

when she refused

another service.

"I'm done, now.

No more communions.

At one ounce each

of holy wafers

I figure I've eaten

a whole Jesus now.

"Enough is enough."

 

 

The Shards of Gods

by Brett Rutherford

Theognis, high in honor
among the archaic Greeks
served Apollo, and thus
he pledged his patron:

“Lord, child of Leto, son
of the lightning-bearing
Zeus of Olympus, I kneel
at your feet and beg
the company of Muses.”

So, too, Theognis
loved every lad whose face
bore any semblance
     to Apollo,
abjectly, in the face of scorn.

“First breath, last breath,
and every breath between,
I consecrate to you,” [1]
he swore to the god,
an adoration worth
a thousand poems at least.

But as for me,
     I serve a fickle deity:
fleet Hermes who comes
and goes as he pleases,
the one who seldom arrives
by daylight,
but rather in dreams,
in ever-deceptive
masks and guises.

Apollo may bless the poets
who labor patiently
at measured epics. I wait,
instead for Hermes,
the avatar of sudden inspiration.

And, just as Theognis pined
     for noble youths
more bent on games and girls,

I spent my youth
     on fair-haired orphans,
     outcasts and dreamers,
my fellow exiles and reprobates.
Not one of them had a home
     to go to; most
had been written out of wills,
     turned out-of-doors
to their own devices.

Oft times I sleep
     with window open,
so that the god
     who makes house-calls
between his errands
may leave me the blossom,
root, or branch
for my next poem,

so too the strays,
scruffy and poorly shod,
may enter at random
when least expected,
in need of caresses.

And thus, through gods
and the shards of gods
on beautiful faces,
the night holds out
against the burning day.

 NOTE:

1. The Theognis quotes are paraphrased from his Elegaic Poems, I, 1-4.

 

 

Fragments in Defense of the Personal Poem

by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia, i

Since those I call the “Telechines,"
(spiteful hammerers in bronze and brass
if I may summarize their style)
will give me no peace, attack me,
I feel compelled to notice them.
Those Cretans whose ignorance appalls
Athena, complain about my poetry,
as though they stood in line with Homer,
because I did not write one epic full
of battles and contentious gods, or lists
of all the ships and those who sent
and manned them, because I did not
catalog the single serpents
on the head of all three Gorgons
and give each one’s biography,
I am only a child to them,
scribbling with chalk my epigrams.

“Look, you’re getting on,” one tells me,
“and nothing to show but love throes
and temple hymns that reach an end
before a single cup of wine has cooled.”

And I say back: “Desist, you race
of expectant critics, all you who feed
on iambics and hexameters.
Long-winded goatherds around a fire,
beat-counters, foot-pounders,
your output is tin by the yard,
while I, in the space of two hands
gather fine gold at the cost of blood
in threads as thin as spiderwebs.

Oh, what my poems cost me!

 

 

2

Poems are sweeter when they are short.
An epic would cover a ball-field;
a lyric’s span is measured
in a two-hand count of heartbeats.

Fatten the offering, as Apollo says,
but only go home with the slender Muse.

The wide track where many chariots
pass from city to city may please
the armies, merchants, messengers,
but I who walk upon two legs
at leisure on my twisty trail,

for me the winding lane,
the path untrod, the den and lair
of the wild one —
here I will pause and write.
A clear spring’s water
and the fruit at hand
suffice me. At love, I contend

with no demons or demigods;
at war, my broken staff
is all but useless, so cease
to demand I sing of Sparta,
or Troy, or the rampant Persians.

Here with the cicadas
I hear no braying asses.
Age weighs me down.
If ever I had fire
like Enceladus, now
I sink beneath the piles
of rock and mountain
where Time entombs me.

No matter! I am content.
One modest Muse did not disdain
to walk with me when I was young.
Here in this lyric brevity
she still companions me.
Humbled and gray now, I persist.

And as for you, who harry me
for what I did not write,
there is a special punishment
the Muses reserve: your names
in footnotes, and nowhere else.

 

 

The Good Town

by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia, 48

A stranger with money
may buy a place
in most any Greek city.
Arriving in youth,
and blessed in face
and figure, you’ll find
your way most anywhere.
The fair are fair and giving,
to those among them
who resemble the statues
that line the temple lane.

If you are poor,
not favored by gods
as a counterfeit
Apollo or Aphrodite,
expect no welcome.
Breadcrumbs and scraps,
the slave’s portion,
a life of fleas and lice
among the most hideous
outcasts shall be yours.

One hope there is.
Set sail for Athens, friend.
Accept no other passage.
Blessed by the daughter of Zeus
and the kindly Eumenides,
this is the only town
whose heart knows pity.

 

 

The Locked-Up Mouth

by Brett Rutherford

     After Theognis, 421-424  

Your mouth
should have a door upon it.

Tongues, teeth and spit,
along with thought-aloud
things that ought not fly
into the ears of friend or foe.
Food in, words out, wrath
flung like nut-stones or bones
too tough to chew; worse yet,
the vomit of insult and invective.

A door, I say,
and a padlock, too.
Keep close the key
but leave ajar the slit
through which kind words
and benevolent sighs
may safely issue.
Go not about
with the door wide open,
except for the dentist
and the assured lover.

The Raven and the Scorpion

The fable of the Raven and the Scorpion, in the Bruges edition of Waarachtingen Fabulen (1567)

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Archias, The Greek Anthology, ix, 339

The Raven, to its prey,
is black death from a clear
blue sky. One, high aloft
with keen eye, spied a stir
from under a crevice
and swooped to catch
the young, red Scorpion.

But, ever alert to threat
from the deceptive sky,
the Scorpion jabbed out
and up into the Raven’s heart.
The beak that had just seized
its tender carapace
went slack. Out slid
the sly invertebrate
as the raptor went
belly up, and died.

Thus Nature works and churns.
Sometimes the killer is killed
by his own intended victim.