Henri V of France

by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted and expanded from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “July 1871”

 

i

They came to call on the Comte de Chambord.
In his reception hall, festooned
with armor and portraiture,
they offer him the crown of France,
a Bourbon Restoration. Henri, the last
of his line and childless, had one
and only one main condition:

 

“The hated tricolor flag must go,
to cancel the guillotine, the blood,
the Terror. Our banner must bear
a single fleur-dy-lys.” — 

                                      “Your majesty,
a people weaned on Revolution
are not about to surrender
freedom, equality, fraternity.
Why not three colors behind
one fleur-de-lys, embroidered
in the finest white and gold?
Or let the nation have its flag,
while you retain the lily proud
as your personal emblem?
Surely Monsieur will not object?” —

“Impossible! One line
from Hugh Capet to Louis the Last
runs in my blood. The state is me,
and my standard is the fleur-de-lys.

It is that, or nothing.” —

 

“On this, Monsieur,
     no compromise is possible.
Paris would go up in flames again!” —

 

“Well, then, this audience is over.”

 

The members of the deputation bow.
They are shown the door. Their carriages
roll down the dusty colonnade.

 

2

Henri, if I may address you informally:
I was an adolescent when you were a child.
Some of my earliest poems were sung
around your fragile and triumphant cradle.

Now winds from the abyss have thrown
you onto one peak, me onto another,
because misfortune has a way
of hurling thunderbolts,
     stranding some men on mountaintops.
The gulf between us,
     makes us seem antipodes to one another.

You go about with a king's mantle
     weighing your shoulders down,
and in your hand
     you wield a once-dazzling scepter,
          with the same ease I wield my pen.
I exceed you in white hairs, and years,

and I know a good man when I see him.
That man is virile and strong,
     who turns a pitiable end
          into a suicide,
who knows how to abdicate everything,
     except his original honor,
who would rather be Hamlet in Elsinore,
and who, knowing himself a ghost already,
     refuses to sell his flag
          even with a kingdom offered.

 

Well, fine. You stood your ground,
as I stood mine, in exile.
They hailed you King for less time
     than it takes to consume
          a carafe of coffee.
Did you enjoy it? The lily is,
as the lily is, all white. It is
what it is, and cannot be otherwise.

It is good, certainly, to remain Capet,
and being Bourbon, you are inclined
    to be an honest man, after all.
(What a shock to the House of Orleans
who had every intention
     of succeeding you!)

 

The ups and downs of history
make many upright persons crawl
where once they strode triumphant.
The sinkholes are piled full of us.
It is better to come out well, prince,
     than to make a bad entrance.

Henri, I tip my tricolor cap
     in honor of your uncrowned head.

 

Last Rites

 by Brett Rutherford

If ever they came
around with Bibles,
they stopped that long ago.
One German New Testament
that came over from Alsace,
somewhere in the cupboard,
was not of any use,

for Harry’s death
was never expected,
not even three knocks
at the window like when
the Grim Reaper came
for ailing Aunt Leni.

Seldom more formal
than long underwear,
he had lorded the table
that night. Three games
of gin rummy, and
wouldn’t you know
he won all three.

They had some beers, of course,
and something they ate provoked
a farting contest. Even Grandma
let loose, but Harry won, of course,
ass-trumpeting the bass clef.

Contented with himself,
he dozed on the day-bed.
They let him be.
While Grandma slept
in her downy feathers,
his heart gave out.

I watched them burn
the day-bed mattress.
When you die, they said,
you pee the bed. There’s
nothing dignified about dying.

A Revolution on Trial

by Brett Rutherford

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

 

You, judges, sitting at the high bar,
imagining the verdict you might make
if Revolution herself were brought to trial,
a harsh, barbaric ferocious defendant
whom even screech-owls flee in panic, who,
respecting no magic makes way through dervishes
and fakirs and marabouts,
not even sparing the church, priests and nuns
scattered, Jesuits in terror and deshabilé.
Knowing that half of this was done
when Revolution merely showed her face,
you, judges, are inflamed with anger.

 

If kings are nothing but inflated men,
and gods are only men exaggerated,
those ghosts that lorded over us
from mountaintops just fade away.
A ghost in armor is a pile of junk.
The reliquary, sacral Popes
are nothing but dried-up ghouls.
That unexpected wind that blows
upon your august brows, o judges,
is a blast from Nature’s bowels.
Your faces distort in outrage.

 

What mourning! What agonies!
Here no fiery burning bush —

instead a black shrub that weeps.

Night’s festivals, voracious and cruel
are done, and only groans remain.

 

An awful day of trial has come.
Smiting their own broad chests,
the interrogators have failed.

Dredging the dark for evidence,
they have come up empty.

The blind bat cannot bear witness;
the weasels wander aimlessly
and shriek in an unknown language;
the lowly worm has lost its dignity
and cannot be pressed for answers.
A solitary fox cries out;
alas, the nocturnal animals

who hunted in that realm of night

     while the birds slumbered,
are at bay, and do not
      respond to summonses.

Wolves are about, and make the woods
too desolate for the bailiffs.

There is no calling up the dead:
the ghosts, oppressed, no longer speak
and jostle one another randomly.

 

Where will you find the evidence?

Have you a good description, even,
of what Revolution looks like,
     and what kind of garb she wears?

Her last known address was everywhere
a month ago, and nowhere at all today.

 

The sun is all wrong: you squint,
     adjust the shades against
     too early light: too hard to read
those endless indictments
     that looked so fine in candle-light!

If things go on this way, goldfish
will dart from ray to shade until
they droop and fall exhausted;
the ravens will hover overhead,
but never choose a place to land;
too weak to lift their coffin lids,
even the loathsome vampires starve.

 

Your inquiries have turned
all Nature topsy-turvy, and you
are no wiser than when you began.

You, in your robes, daring to think
that Revolution could be put in chains,
and marched away to the galleys,
the truth is right before you —
it is the dawn itself you try to stop.

 

 

Critics and Theorists

by Brett Rutherford

 

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

 

VI

So long as its branches spread wide and green
above the marshy ground, so long as it becomes
the most enormous dome of the forest,
does the oak even notice below itself
the hideous water in which its roots abide?

 

Termites and carpenter ants, insects of horror,
creep up through the brush toward it, drawn
by its mass and its seeming immobility,
but to it, as to the marble giant, august
and mutilated, to it, as to the granite sphinx,
sinister in its own roseate light, to it
the machinations of wood-lice mean nothing!

 

When night’s dark winds convulse
    and make the palm trees quiver,
the Colossus does not doubt himself;
hands on his knees, thoughtful and calm,
he waits to make its speech at dawn.

If slugs at his base track drool and slime,
he ignores it. If dank toads congregate,
and make a council against him,
he is unaware that such beings exist.

 

If some learnèd worm comes inching up,
intent to take lodge on his visage,
he never acknowledges affront
with either nod or sigh. He stays mute,
holding within the deep resonance
of his frightening mystery.
Let legions come, make festival,
bleat their own names at his expense,
thousands resplendent with honors
and festooned with scrolled diplomas —

not one of them comes back from Memnon
with affirmation or prophecy. It was
as though they had never come and gone.

He waits the appointed sunrise,
and the suddenly ruddy glow it casts
upon his features, and only then
will his formidable voice come forth,

and he will never mention them. 

Falkenfels

by Brett Rutherford

 

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

 

V

One sees it in the distance — Falkenfels! —
up there amid the drizzle, the demolished burg
of an old count who lost his fortune, a ruin now.
I wanted to see the town, and better yet,
to set eyes on the man who lords over it.

 

Mounting the hill I find
an unexpected ravine, in which
an old chapel was overrun with beetles,
its only congregants. The crucifix,
tipped over, and the pulpit, broken
and toppled sideways, give proof
that no priest ever comes down here.
The place is near collapse; no one
in this impoverished spot holds out
a coin to help repair it. They dance in rags,
not finery, at harvest fête.

As for the dead, they get no masses
said in their names, no candles lit.

No money anywhere — now that’s

enough to drive a priest away.
Even a saint deserts his niche,
when the last rat has nibbled away
the last crumb of the sacred Host.

There is no gold, just gilding,
and God himself would snort
     at such a miserable threshold.

So this is why the chapel died.

A genuflect is wasted here.

 

From this corpse of a church
I turn my back and flee
with a shiver this shadowy ditch,
to resume my climb to the summit.

I blink. I find myself here again
as though I had never moved,
but the sun is far behind me.

Again, the sinister chapel.

 

What happened was this:
I got to Falkenfels.
Sublime but tawny, in stark,
undecorated hues, the high town stood.

Even in broad daylight the tower loomed
so that its battlements cast
a hulking sense of menace.

Even a window-box flower wilts
when the sun is threatened thus.

In the wall-gap where once a gate
had proudly blocked all visitors,
under a high and tarnished coat-of-arms,
there sat a tall and pensive old peasant —
no, it was the Count himself!

 

He did not rise from his low camp-stool.
At the sound of my slow steps he turned
his head my way but did not rise.

As I had come unannounced, it was
my duty to declare myself and hail him.

If there had ever been retainers,
     guards, and servants, none came
          to block my way to his view.

The only one near him was the child,
     a pink young face beneath a rumpled cap.

Saluting a defeated man is no easy thing.

     I did him the honor of naming him.
I saluted the abolished count as though
     he still retained his honors.

I said to him honestly, “I grieve to see
    you poor now, who once were great.
A traveler and stranger, I come to greet
     you in the most civil manner.”

In a long silence I regarded him,
     the shattered walls, the ugly town,
          the mountain range around us,
               the distance from everything
                    that mattered.

I looked at the boy and blurted out:

“O, let me take this child to the city!

Returning to Nature and becoming wild
     is good for old men like us,
but for the child this is terrible.

Dawn trembles in the choking fog.
Roses die here in perpetual shade,
where the only bird is the owl.

I see on your brow the proud silhouette
of your ancestral towers —
     even if nothing blossoms here now
          but the lowly bramble —

this has a desolate beauty, I know,
but living in one’s own century is better.

Your child would wither here, and die
     without knowing more of the world
          than the far peaks seen in the mist.

 

“This is a time of monsters, and prodigies,
     but the prodigy is sure to conquer.

A dark eagle is such a one — I see at least
     a falcon’s eye gleaming there —
Is this your son? Your son’s son, then?
Dark grandfather, dare now to send him forth.
Let him see Paris as pilgrims once
     went all the way to Rome.

No one will call him ‘Count,’ admittedly,
     but there he can add
     to his noble and beautiful name
          a scroll of brave and worthy deeds.

 

“When you move on, you must let others in.
The eagle sends the eaglet forth, the shrub
must escape the old oak’s shadow.

This is the right progression of things.” —

 

Beneath his sinister and forbidding face
the old man smiled superbly. He saw through me,
and forgave my hasty admonitions.

Although I stood, he, seated still,
     made me inclined to kneel,
as his low voice rumbled out.

 

“Ruin loves isolation” he said.

“If I was once a big man, it suits
me now to keep quiet concerning it.

People are curious about a fallen man.

They come to gawk. You saw me — good for you.
At least you were polite about it.
There’s nothing more to say —
     allies and friends, acquaintances even —
I no longer exist for them. So let us be.” —

 

“But what of the boy?” I argued still.
“A spirit meant to soar needs light.
Old man, there is more than night!

What father would not regret
     a child without a future?”

 

“I who am dead,” the old man replied,
“hear miserable things about the likes of you
and all the others who boast about their lives;
that among you, only the inexorable
get to celebrate a triumph; that man
kills man in endless retaliation;
that the fox is more admired than the lion;

that words called “true” one day
     are suspect in the next;
that Reason limps along with naught
     below her kneecaps;
that bodies of those the Left disposes of
     pile up in heaps, while the Right

mows others down mechanically
     with something they call
          a “machine-gun”;
and that, amid the blood and cries,
     the horror and misery,
it is a crime to open one’s door
    to anyone proscribed,
         to offer them asylum.

 

“Is this true? I fear it is.” —
     I dared not contradict him.
“Is this false? I hope so.” —
     My silence told him all.

“So let me be. I am honest in my den.

My grandson here will drink
     the same pure water as I do.
You offer me your city,
     while I prefer the woods.
Why so? seeing the men you are,
     I find more sympathy in rocks,

and in the animals, less
    of your collective stupidity.”

 

Chastened, I had no arguments.

My downhill journey passed with ease,
as though a wind were pushing me.
Now, looking back up
     at the hulking towers
I feel the contempt of Falkenfels.

 

  

Insubstantial

by Brett Rutherford

A post-election dream acrostic

[I]nvisible you are not, although at times
     and in some company, you could
           prefer to be.
[N]onexistence is not an option
     for an existent being, while
[S]ublimation from solid to vapor,
     as in a lightning strike or
     the unwished-for encounter
          with a mushroom cloud,
     might be a possible exit.
[U]nknown, unseen, and undiscovered,
     a status preferred
          for certain unhappy peoples
               up the Amazon
     (bulldozers and buzz-saws
          coming their way!); to sink
[B]elow the notice of bureaucrats
     and the ardent young militias,
     like centipedes beneath a carpet,
          night be a prudent ploy.
[S]maller is better, minute is better still,
     and minuscule is not quite there:
     try sizing yourself to nano, when
[T]error is a state, along with Texas and Florida,
     where it is better not to leave one’s house at all.
[A] is no longer a winning grade, the best —
     with such a surname one gets
          to the top of those lists of enemies,
     and if that letter falls at the end of it,
          you alien, you, so much the worse.
[N]ullity, when you are assigned a string
     of numbers no way resembling
     ones given to your snatched-away children,
     is the empty set of exiles and strays.
[T]otalitarian, the one six-syllable word
     you’d rather not pronounce, and which
          you never thought to thumb
     a glossary for, until the books were gone;
[I]gnorance being preferable to knowing
     that for the end of everything
          you have yourself to blame;
[A]bsent a conscience, the robot stumbles, aims
     a random gun at a random target: you
[L]oser in DNA’s long game of dice — who
     do you think you are, you speck
         in the howling cosmos? you,
              a gray, deluded dust-mote
                   for whom no god has ever bled.
        Cinder in a shroud of ash, you are
              [ INSUBSTANTIAL.]

Ever and Always, We Are Crucified

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, July 1871

 

What hatred invents, the mob
embraces as self-evident truth.

Calumny’s worm, some vile, invented lie,
creeps over every man who is great.

It seems each radiant brow the sun
beams down upon, attracts
     its very own crown of thorns;
instead of his accustomed cup,
     he is offered atrocious gall.

To be star, one wears
     a cloak of infamous darkness.

 

Listen. They say of Phidias,
     that he sold not only statues,

          but the bodies of women as well;
that vices got their name
     from what Socrates did with his pupils;

that Horace had a way with goats
    that made temple virgins shudder;
that Cato threw an African slave
     into a bay of sharks;

that Michelangelo loved gold, and paid
     gold out for blackmail, and gave
himself in service to the staff of Popes
(he, a Roman!) stretched out his back
    to them, while with the other hand
          he asked his price;

that Dante’s roving eye
     shone with the glint of greed;

 

that Moliere mistook himself
    for his daughter’s husband;
that the encyclopedic Diderot
     took bribes with the hand
           that was not busy editing.

 

And so before the human race,
     the gossiping tribunal storms.
For the crime of his genius,
    not one has ever been spared.
Ever and always, the punishment comes!

Name one, and there upon his cross
     he hangs with his defining slander.

Not one, in ancient times as well as now,
who on the bleeding Golgotha of glory,
     with the halo of his good works
          upon his forehead,
not one escapes the vile cross.

Some have a sly Caiaphas[1]
     accusing him of blasphemy,

others have some grammarian
like the “Homer-whipper” Zoilus.[2]

Ever and always, the crucifixion goes on.

 

---

[1] Caiaphas, Judaean high priest associated with the crucifixion of Jesus.

[2] Zoilus. Greek grammarian who attacked Homer, who was ironically crucified for his criticisms of Ptolemy II Philadelphus in Egypt.

The Lion of Waterloo

by Brett Rutherford

Translated and adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, July 1871

 

Two brothers in mutual murder in Thebes,
Eteocles and Polyneices, the sons of Oedipus,[1]
and Cain who slays his brother Abel,
O brothers, the price of human quarrel!

Land passes hands and scaffolds arise.
Flags turn to shrouds in black tatters.
Tombs open hastily to admit
      a new generation of sons —

O Mighty God! when comes the day
     when you will smite Death itself?

A holy peace would be so welcome now.

War is a prostitute,
the infamous concubine of Chance.

 

Her lovers are a moronic Attila,
a Tamerlane ungraced by art.
She prefers such men, and with her choice
she drags all hope into the pit
     of a mass interment.
She welcomes springtime with slaughter.
She tramples our wishes underfoot,
and as she is hatred incarnate,
     I dare to hate her.

I place my hope in you,
     invisible walker-in-shadow,

the Future!

No Greeks derived the algebras
     that limn and number our present works.
The shadowy and sad labyrinth
     in which we wander is full
of sudden panics, traps and abandonments.

But still in our hand we hold the thread
     which alone can guide us to safety.

Let Atreus duel on against Thyestes
     in struggle that spans generations;
let the Leviathan take on
     the ever-bellowing Behemoth
in fights that rage for millennia —
still I love and believe.
From the baffling enigma
     let one clear word emerge!

 

Shall humankind remain in shadow
    for all their days? Not so!

Not so! It is not our sad destiny
to sit in torpor on the cold threshold
     of old tombs, like Saint Jerome,
wasting away in Ombos,[2] or like
     Elektra’s agonized waiting
          before the gates of Argos.

 

One day, defying the very thought
     of specters, I went to see
the lion monument at Waterloo.

I passed through ravines to reach
the undulating plain of the battlefield.

It was the dawning hour, crepuscular.
I could make out the black mound
where nothing more than a hillock
had been before. I walked straight to it.

 

I felt indignant on behalf of the dead.
I ascended precisely because
    the glory of blood, of the sword,
    of the mass death makes me shudder.

It was my business to confront this,
the Dutch king’s monument
     in the name of his wounded son.
The lion lorded it
     over the silent plain below.

No human eye had thus surveyed
    the ebb and flow of battle, no!

I looked upon the tall king of beasts.
It breathed not; its immobility
     seemed to defy infinity.

One feels that this creature,
     banished to silhouette the depth of sky,
not pawing his familiar grassland
     but hurled into a field of azure,
grows proud here in its solitude,
that it never grows tired
     of the terrible memory it carries.
Fierce, he glowers down
    as if he had witnessed the carnage.

 

As I climbed up the stone stairway,
     I fell partway into the lion’s shadow.
I said to myself, he is implacable
     by day, but haply at night
he might emit a small, dull roar,
and someone who stayed too late
upon the desolate field would flee it,
confusing the lion’s roar with thunder.

More steps, and I was almost eye-to-eye
with the lion. Now he and I
stood lightning rod together,
     and I heard a song.

 

The humblest voice came forth
     from this enormous maw.
Here in this frightful and deformèd lair
a robin had come to make its nest,
and no one had disturbed it!

(O happy invader in the plain of death!)
This gentle, winged passer-by,
     lulled by innocent spring-time,
had placed her nest and brood here
among his brazen teeth,
with no fear of the unclosing jaw,
and chirped and sang as ever robin
to the world has sung
     from inside the pensive lion.

 

Here on this tragic man-made mount,
like a reef in a plain of so much blood,
I envisioned, pale and listening,
a deep spirit descending upon me.
My people, hark! I understood
hope sings to us in what was once

despair. Peace makes its nest
inside the horrible jaws of war.

 

 

---

[1] Polyneices, son of Oedipus, and Eteocles, his younger brother, kill one another in the struggle for control of Thebes.

[2] Saint Jerome is often depicted with a lion and lived as a hermit and spent much time around deserted tombs. I can find no reference to his being in any place named “Ombos,” a name for two different locales in Egypt.

It Was Not Supposed to Be That Way

by Brett Rutherford

It was not supposed to be that way.
The trees I grew up with are gone:
lightning struck one, another succumbed
to fungus rot, another removed
when the lead pipes were replaced.
I found the school at Hecla a ruin,
and finally, an empty lot. Iron plates
now cover the coal mine opening
where we watched the miners descend
into their daily hell from our desks.
The school at Kingview all boarded up
no longer has that playground
the bullies dominated; the store
to which I ran for penny candy is gone.
The middle school is an empty lot,
ditto my high school, not even a piece
of chalk to remember it by.

We knew we outlive the aged among us;
great-grandparents certainly, the ones
we had to shout at to be heard, whose
rocking chairs are rent to splinters, who,
cremated, may not even have graves
you can visit. Then one by one
the teachers retired and died, until
the last of them is gone. They heard
the first French words you sounded out,
explained the Greeks’ geometry,
and lit your way with Scott and Shakespeare.

Now every ramshackle house
we lived in has been demolished:
the big brick house aslant
the slag heaps of the mines and ovens,
the sagging little houses
     on Kingview Road,
          Mulberry Street,
          North Main — vanished!

It was not supposed to be that way.
If elders had prevailed, the draft
would have taken me. I would not
have defied it and fled to New York.
The trees would remember me, then,
and plaques in my name would adorn
the hall of every school I attended.
My bones would come to light in Hanoi,
and come home in a military transit.
Someone would hold dear the folded flag
that gathered dust on the mantel;
perhaps the house with its one gold star
would not have been demolished.

I went instead to San Francisco, came back
and earned me my own FBI file
for my underground urges. Like Walt,
I reveled in Manhattan’s orgies.

I frequented the opera. I lived.
The trees, the schools,
    the houses demolished behind me
one by one, fall in my shadow.
Poets became my family,
     musicians my friends.
Nothing I did
    was the way it was supposed to be.
Treeless, homeless, orphaned, proud.