To Cross the Sea

by Brett Rutherford

I should move to England,
if only to perish there,
in or not far from
some ancestral spot.
I have claim
to William the Conqueror's
land-grant, a ruined
castle or two, a manor
baronial, farmsteads
abandoned to birds
and nettles, a burial ground
with Roman and Druid bones
somewhere beneath.

I should, really,
for the British believe,
in their heart of hearts,
in ghosts. That means
I may persist
in pestering others
with whispered poems
for ages to come,

where here,
on the lunatic side
of the Atlantic, a poet,
dead, winds up
in a dead-tire heap
or land-fill, fame being
the time it takes
for a pot to boil dry.

Down at the Docks

In Greek legend, Galatea is a sea-nymph who loves a mortal boy named Acis. The monster Cyclops named Polyphemus loves Galatea and kills the boy. Galatea runs away and rejoins the sea nymphs.

Here is my modern retelling of the story:

DOWN AT THE DOCKS

by Brett Rutherford

One-eyed Paulie had this Gal, you see.
Gal was all they called her.
Oh, he had his eye on her.
She had both eyes on Acey,
who, having a preference
for the sailors,
wouldn’t even glance her way.

It was sad to watch it happen.
Paulie made his eye-patch wet
with weeping — Gal moped away,
pale as dried cod — Acey
missed out on all the flirting
that other guys would swoon for,
’cause he was buyin’ drinks
for all the Merchant Marine.

It reached a head one night
when Paulie caught Acey
behind The Gold Talon,
and skewered him good
with an old harpoon.
All things considered,
cops looked the other way,
Acey being, you know,
what was he doing there,
anyway, up to no good?

Then Paulie found Gal
just walkin’ the pier,
and as he tells it, “Look,
I just grabbed her.
I couldn’t help myself.”

She slid away from him
as smooth as an eel.
Fell in, she did, and sank.
They dived, they looked.
No sign of her.

Down at the docks, you need
to stay clear of one-eyed Paulie.
All he can think about is Gal,
and all he says is that
she’s off with the mermaids,
not dead at all, not dead,
not that. He moans,
“All I did was to grab her.
I couldn’t help myself.”

Wanderer's Song

by Brett Rutherford

I am my own shepherd. I do not want.
The neighbor whose pasture I slept in last night
does not mind: the fence is not for people.
Nuts fall from the trees, and apples, too.
Between two warring towns I freely walk.
In my simple ways I cannot distinguish
a friend from a foe. Three towers ring out
in clashing chorales of discordant bells.
Crowds waving books bound in the skins of lambs,
shout curses at one another. They look at maps,
draw angry lines to define a border,
and melt down their ploughshares to make a gun,
that will lift a whole village and drop it
again, consuming all in smithereens of rage.

Among such lunatics, it is not wise
to linger. Now, back to the hills for me!
Yet Nature has its hazards if you look.
Still waters breed mosquitoes, and wolves watch
to see who tarries there too long, and, lame,
would never outrun them to the forest brake.

My modest hut beneath a hanging rock
is serenaded by a pebbled creek,
and the bats, my silent brethren, swoop down
to tell the secrets of the coming dawn.

There is a valley where no one goes,
except, they do say, the dead and the mad.
Free-thinkers go there. Sometimes, among them,
we think we are the only ones who truly live.
We shake our heads at the cannons’ thunder;
and over the ridge, the exultant bugle
preludes the mutual cries of sudden death.
Some take a life, some give a life, for what?

We hold only the weapon of reason,
yet they would rather die than take it up.
Tempting it is to stay here always.
With brotherhood and peace
     my cup runs over.

 

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 5

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

5.

Imagine there’s an ocean
     with infinite depths

into which all troubles, cast,

close the book of destiny —
done, gone, and disappeared.

Let the ever-renewing waves
sweep clean the shore.

The tide keeps folding over
whoever is thrown into it.
Sea-maws open for new victims,
two hungry flaps for doors.

 

Hurl in the criminals!
If the innocent go, too,
punished in the confusion,
so what? It’s over now!

Judges rebuke historians
with gavels raised:
“Now, let’s not dwell on the past.”

 

To men of ice who never thaw,
always on the sharp edge
     of justice, impartial
to the to point of punishing all,
it is a matter or triage:
to cure a wound, cut off the limb.

 

Convenient it is,
to sentence men en masse.

New-minted justice
     could be order’s foundation,
but no! like fish thrown back
unwanted come to the net again,
those spared one horror
     have another in store,
their tick-marked names
up on one list and down
     on another.
All are cast into the same abyss.

 

Irrelevant: the facts, the doubts,

     the losses we all suffered
      together as a people,
the moil of the reckless men
and the brothers and women
     who followed them;
the child who took up
     the paving stones
or mocked the soldiers
      in lewd gesturing’

the crime of merely being
in a place where crimes occurred.

 

Instead we are told to believe
that everything was saved,
ills, tears, and turbulence,
not cut by a scythe, but swept
aside as though a broom

God wielded would sweep them all,
     storm-drain to sewer,
          and river to sea.
Look! The city! Open for business!

 

Smugly, you ask me to approve of this.
     What can I say? You are wrong.
The screams still echo.
The fear is palpable. The blood,
     the charnel pits, the grapeshot,
the sea so sick of justice
     it would vomit back your dead!

 

Since I stand here blaming you,
     next it is all my fault,

because I have something inside,
     that ticks and beats, and which
     you seem to be lacking.

How many more times
can lightning strike
     the blind and poor?

 

I shudder. Not to mention
the future harvest of revenges
your every action sows.

“Working for the best,” your
outcome is the worst possible.
If this in a state is wisdom,
     how does it differ
         from dementia?

 

That which flows out,
     tides back anew
with the force of the moon
     behind it.
Suffering and Hatred are sisters.

In darkness, one assumes
     the raiment of the other.

 

Now, even if I, whose guilt
    might be called a naïve innocence,
might return to that austere absence,
to the harsh and dreary isolation
    from which these last twelve months
    seemed as white as dawn,
even if some shadow, inexorable,
     called me back to my high cliff —
wretches without hope, you have
     one friend in me,
          and I will not be quiet!

 

People, you have the night
    and me, as your witnesses.
The law is dead. Hope has fallen.
Let it not see said that France
     fell into a total eclipse,
and no one said a word of protest.

I am calamity’s best friend.

 

To those who have been damned, I saw:
In Hell I walk beside you. I want to be —
to take this part, the best, to stand
beside the one who has never done evil
and whose cry will not be heard.

Your leaders led you astray; and I,
     at least, have told you history.

 

What poet would not prefer
     a golden victory?
Now I must take the part of the fallen.
My solitary march is not
     toward the flag of victory,
but somewhere off
     where the shrouds are gathered.

 

I open the grave of the common man.
And now your jeering rains upon me,
the shrieking of prostituted souls,
sarcasms paid for by the line,
gratuitous lies, the likes
of which Nonette and Maupertuis
tormented Voltaire,
     the same raised fists
which chased Rousseau away,
cries blacker than the winds
    of some Libyan sirocco,
more vile than that whip
     with leather straps
they used to scourge, in flight,
     the coffin of Molière,
the idiotic irony
     of your fierce anathemas,
the ring of dried saliva
     around the mouths
which had only yesterday spat
on the pale Christ’s forehead,
you flying stones
    eternally thrown at all
         who have been proscribed,
keep at it, fiends!

 

Outrages as yet unheard of,
     I welcome you.

I wear your insults as a badge.
The higher the affront
     against the people,
     the higher the glory.

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 4

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

4

To deny me the right to be,
     is to kill me.
To deny me the right to do good,
     you hack my limbs
     and make me useless.

Am I nothing but a head that screams?
Unheard amid an infamous storm,
I crash at random
where bitter foam and wave collide.

 

To say I have no right to France,
     my Mother? How can this be?
I have my uses, you know.
Can I not probe, O victors,
into the dark social well
that gapes at your hearts’ bottom?

Have I no knack
     of discerning evil,
     of finding remedies,
of looking everywhere
for an Archimedes lever
that would bring us back to peace?

 

Someone must forge the key
to the new times coming. Poets
devoid of credit and bank accounts,
might seem to have something to offer.

We have fought much;
     sometimes we have worked together.
Proud social trials
     have come to naught;
some vaunted efforts
     have shown success.
We struggled together.

 

Why turn your thinkers,
doctors and guides,
your philosophical elder
brothers, into a pile
of shipwrecked wretches,
gasping on an unknown shore?

 

Are we unclear and mysterious?

Will banning our books suffice
to silence all enigmas?
Will the Sphinx do penance
and genuflect to Christ?

The deeds of old men, the spite
of thwarted children, rule the day.
What a future, statesmen!
Philosophers, oh, what a dream!

 

It comes down to policy:
expel enough people,
and everything will be fine.

Enough of grievances,
     catastrophes,
anguish and convulsion!

Just go back home and shout:
“I am a minister
     and everything is fine.
Don’t look at that sinister horizon.
Ignore those heavy, haggard clouds,
red blood-bloated specters floating there
are angels misperceived. All’s right.

That is not hell-fire there. It’s dawn.”

 

This vessel has death for a pilot.
It is the Raft of the Medusa.

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 3

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

3

So those you did not kill,
     you are happy to be “rid of?”
What if they get rid of themselves?

So what if ones says,
     “Oh, very well,
          I am going abroad.”
It is a lie. Life, hollowed out,
expressionless faces drained
of their proper emotion.
Self-exile is a little death.
Flight, looking over one’s shoulder,
is not a vacation. The earth
itself seems to have cast one out;
a world, no longer round,
seems just a forest without paths.

Nameless, I fear
     I will become transparent.
Ashes descend upon my hair,
     my eyes, my fingernails
are smashed and soiled. I pass
from place to place, where signs
are in an unknown language.

Does anyone think of me?

An abyss of non-being
     opens to swallow me.

No more in the night do I hear
the turnings and sighs
of those who slept close to me.
It is all wolves and ravens here.
I am forgotten in the night forever.

 

There is a dream in which
you play yourself, but when you wake
from it you are no longer sure
of your present existence.

Back home, more lies are told
about thousands of innocent people,
who are too stunned
     to defend themselves.
You are not there to help.

Beneath that sky, in the sun
that warmed my homeland better
than anywhere else,
     I am no longer a citizen.

My home, the field I labored in,
my industry, my wife, my children —
show me the clear light
     in which they still exist!

 

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 2

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

2

And what of those condemned
to the prison transports I have written of,
dying at sea in those smothering
between-decks, borne down
by the enormity of the fleeing ship?

They cannot stand. They reel
as the floor tips at insane angles.
They eat with their fingers
     from a common tub,
drink one after another
     from a rusty can.

They roast, they freeze.

 

A howling hurricane
     torments their dungeon.
The water roars, and should one catch
a glimpse into the sky above,
there is nothing there but a cannon
extending its neck in silhouette
into the storm’s black eye.

 

Have pity if they die,
at latitude and longitude unknown,
for should they land
at the place of their intended
banishment, what then?

 

Thinking of them, I swoon
in despair and mourning.
It suffocates the self to bear
so much concern, and for so many.
If we knew their actual number,
it would numb the soul.

 

No one is bad, I tell myself,
yet how much evil our hands accomplish!

 

There is a registered list somewhere
of those who shiver on the sobbing sea,
whom even the weeping sky pities —

O land of brutal exile! —
O, to be dashed instead
     against unyielding rocks!

One man — is it you, or me? —
is thrown there, sad and worried,
     trembling and naked,
a random figure
     among a howling crowd.
Mists! Storms! Wave upon wave,
smash upon smash until no breath
remains that is not salt and spume.
Eyes in a gray mist unable to know
what is near, and what far away
in an empty, gray, falling tide.

 

One lives! He stands upright!
He has made it through Hell’s ocean.

Sands slide tormentingly;
a distant sun throbs. Sea birds
call out in no known language,
their welcome? Their mockery?

 

This is the exile’s dawn.
What if no one comes?
What if no one helps?

What if all that one owns
is the broken thread of love?

The Anatomy of Reprisals, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

1

Fear not, I am with you.
Perhaps I am perverse,
but I am drawn
to poor souls overwhelmed,
to those whom lightning strikes,
then strikes again.

I feel a bond of brotherhood.
You — even if I fought and won
some struggle against you —
the misery of one defeated brings
darkness upon us all.

A somber joy enlightens me.

Insults that once pelted me,
I wish now to forget.

Do sparrows and doves,
alert and about the business of peace
recall what hated names you hurled?
They fell like harmless pebbles.

Have you and I the luxury
of mutual hatred,
when they are all happy?

Are who are “they?”
The ones you could not bring
yourself to speak of: the people.

How many weeks or months have passed
since men have seen a pay-check?
It is they, the sad families,
men, woman and children,
their rights, their future,
that I defend.

I stand with the led-astray,
the weak, and this very crowd,
which, never having had
a ladder to ascend,
collapses in madness
under dark events.
Dwelling in ignorance, their air
is only inclement weather.

Alas! How many times must I
repeat the lesson I have for you?
It was up to you, the fortunate,
to lead them, to yield to them
their share of the city’s bounty.
Your faulty vision blinded them;
abused by us,
as by a miserly guardian,
the harvest reaped and hurled at us
is Wrath. The harms
they now inflict on all
is a cornucopia of hatred.

A little brotherhood
would have gone a long way.
Who guided them? Who took
their hands and taught them
to shun the shadows and walk
where the true light glimmers?

No one! We left them lost
in a labyrinth until
they came out all Minotaurs.

To be sure, they terrify you now,
in their eyes no glint
of fraternity.

Did you count on their “inherent goodness?”
Their shadowed souls fed on emptiness.
They stumbled about in search of light,
encountering various monsters
as they went,
in a fog so thick and dreary
their thoughts got tangled up
as in a brambled wood.
Adrift, they saw no lighthouse,
as currents incomprehensible
hurled them on rocks of misery.

Spun ’round and ’round
they staggered, dizzy-drunk,
stunned just like Ixion
chained to his fiery wheel,
blamed for misfortune as though
it were some primal sin of their own.

This being their plight,
I so resolved to ask
that bread and the light
of truth and learning
be given freely to all.

Or did you imagine that when
the black cannon of Vendémiaire
fired off its last charge in June,
that when the smoke cleared,
revealing the rubble of May’s
bombings, that all would be well,
since everyone in sight was dead?

What? One rooster crows,
and all past wounds should vanish?

If I were asked to help the people,
to solve their problems —
then first things first. I lean to them,
and tell them that I love them.
(Is that so difficult a thing?
The quandary may be
I mean it, and you do not.)

Everything else flows from this
one simple declaration. Yes,
I am with and of the people.
I am fiercely obstinate
about my gentleness
toward the vanquished.
Again and again I tell you,
“No! No reprisals!”

Perhaps I have grown soft with age,
but when a man weeps and sobs,
my heart grows pensive; the sight
of mothers with children in their arms,
melts me away. When I think
that they killed some old, fat lady,
harmless to anyone, whose hands
we saw reach out from a pit of corpses —
O pity! To think of all those
you still intend to do away with!

Ghosts without epitaphs
tug at our sleeves and cry,
“I was proscribed!” —
“I was a martyr!” —
“No one even told me
why it was they shot me!” —

Let this not be our table-talk
in the midst of mourning
already terrible. Let sorrows
pass through us as through a sieve;
let the wind winnow them
as they go to whatever shadow
the deep sky reserves for them.
Do the hands of the dying
reach up to tell us something? Or not?

Books Published in 2024, So Far

In spite of election horrors, The Poet's Press has published 18 new, expanded or revised books so far this year, including new versions of our books in PDF and epub/Kindle editions. The year so far:

Emilie Glen. The Writings of Emilie Glen 3: Poems from Magazines. Second expanded edition. 310 pages. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches.

Brett Rutherford. September Sarabande. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 490 pages.

Brett Rutherford. September Sarabande. PDF e-book. 490 pages.

Brett Rutherford. From Hecla to Jacob's Creek. EPUB and Kindle e-book.

Denise LaNeve. Half-Lives of the Radium Girls. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 112 pages.

Denise LaNeve. Half-Lives of the Radium Girls. EPUB and Kindle Ebook.

Mikhail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreyev. Two Russian Exiles: Selected Fiction. Edited/adapted and introduced by Brett Rutherford. Revised and corrected edition. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 266 pages.

Mikhail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreyev. Two Russian Exiles: Selected Fiction. Edited/adapted and introduced by Brett Rutherford. Revised and corrected edition. EPUB edition.

J. Rutherford Moss. The Hand You're Dealt. Kindle epub edition.

Suzanne Gili Post. Venus of Malta. Kindle epub edition.

Brett Rutherford. An Expectation of Presences. EPUB Kindle edition.

Brett Rutherford. Midnight on Benefit Street. Poetry, fiction, and journal entries for 2012-2014. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 276 pages.

Brett Rutherford. Midnight on Benefit Street. Poetry, fiction, and journal entries for 2012-2014. PDF ebook, 276 pages.

Li Yu. Emperor Li Yu, A Life in Poems. Poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Li Yu. 6 x 9 inches, paperback, 174 pages. Illustrated with 24 paintings from the Tang and Song Dynasties. [Previously issued only in hardcover.]

Michael Frachioni. Bus Poems. Paperback, 6 x 9 inches, 128 pages.

Callimachus. Callimachus in Alexandria: A Poem Cycle. A poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Callimachus. Second, expanded edition. 100 pages, paperback.

Callimachus. Callimachus in Alexandria: A Poem Cycle. A poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Callimachus. Second, expanded edition. 100 pages, PDF ebook.

Callimachus. Callimachus in Alexandria: A Poem Cycle. A poem cycle by Brett Rutherford, adapted and expanded from poems by Callimachus. Second, expanded edition. Kindle epub edition.

On Collective Stupidity

There seems to be social pressure not to call people "stupid." Let me try to lay out circumstances in which the label applies. Some individual voters made decisions to vote for a senile, amoral, criminal, climate-denying fool. I see such persons every day, and some are surprisingly well-educated, but on certain issues they seem to have lost all ability to evaluate facts and anticipate outcomes. Some have been swayed by a half-century of hate propaganda portraying liberals as Communists. Some have a single-issue on which they vote, not caring about the consequences on any other issue -- this single issue might be abortion, or it might be the belief that the president has direct control over inflation and gas prices, or it may be a single-minded obsession with one's investment portfolio. For yet others, the single issue is fear of the "other," whether it is pet-eating Haitians or the horror of not knowing the biological sex of the person in the next seat.

Each individual vote is the best that one can do, given their limited knowledge, their prejudices, and their fears. I know people with PhDs who voted for Jill Stein, and nothing could persuade them that their vote was thrown away -- they revel in the purity of their choice.
Where "stupid" comes in is in the aggregate. The result of all these individual actions is collective stupidity. The looming climate disaster was barely mentioned in the campaigns. It is collective stupidity to elect climate-denying, corrupt fools at this moment in history, just as it is corporate stupidity to focus on quarter-to-quarter profits when the burning of fossil fuels threatens to literally end the ability of humans to live at all.

For a big chunk of my life, I was a libertarian. Which, I finally realized, was a devotion to a silly utopian ideal in which productive geniuses would lead the way with enlightened self-interest. Burning up the planet you live on is not enlightened self-interest. Neither is selling products that kill people. There is no time now for the playing out of strong-man, fascist fantasies, or any other utopian scheme that is based on hatred of those who hold one set of ideals against those who hold another. (Fighting over pie while you are in the oven). Hands at each others' throats, they fail to see that the hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and superstorms are indifferent to politics.

 
Only the greatest collaborative scientific and engineering effort will save the human species from the climate catastrophe. Everything else is a distraction. And yes, the word "stupid" applies, especially since we cannot wait ten or twenty years for the politics to swing round from fascist to liberal.

Bottom line: even "educated" people do stupid things, and when they do them en masse, we are collectively stupid.