Month of Wine

by Brett Rutherford

Since the joys of wine

are denied me, I did not think

of October as a month brim full

of alcohol, a Bacchanalia.

But then one year,

out Elsdon way in old

Northumberland,

in memory of the Baron

of my name, I heard offered

"a tankard of October."

Was Bradbury here,

I wondered? Did Shelley's

breath of autumn's being

come this far north?

No, this describes

the best and strongest

of ales, October-brewed.

In Queen Anne's day

a Tory club met secretly

in Parliament's shadow,

to drink October Ale

and hurl insults

at the hated Whigs.

Neutral the stern name

October, from Rome,

eighth calendar month,

prefix to sides, legs, and years

(-gon, -pus, -genarian),

but ask the Dutch what time

of year it was in olden times

and they say Wynmaand,

"the wine month." In

Chaucer's day it was still

known as Winmonath,

to the Jacobins in Paris,

Vendémiaire (the time

of vintage). So add I must

to every fall, a demitasse,

if not a tankard,

of October Ale.

Let the year tip tipsy

till fall-on-your-face

winter seizes all.

Strip Woods

by Brett Rutherford

Immodest, these

shivering sycamores

wiggle to Offenbach's

Orpheus in Hades

can-can, the trees'

strip-tease for all

to view. Maples

askew in their scarlet

underwear, oaks

making the wind pluck off

one leaf at a time

from their muscled

limbs, till streams

are clogged with them.

The brazen gingko

fan-dancer

sheds all its gold

pasties in one

great shrug.

And there they stand

amid the cheers and whoops

and drunk applause:

wide trunks with peeling

bark, old maple ladies

raked with lightning marks

and fungal warts, saplings

so thin and straight, no curve

to stir the loins, stick-twigs

and gnarled fingers, ring-

hungry and desperate

to be taken home, each

taking one final can-can

kick and calling out

Don't forget me, mister!

You saw me naked!

An Oak Leaf, Solitary

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Lermontov

A single, solitary leaf of oak,
sensing disaster imminent
and prematurely brown,
breaks free of its tall parent
and in a fit of panic
hitches whatever breeze
comes first, and from it goes
above the treeline to cloud-
top, to where the Boreal
gods make annual rounds
from Arctic to Tropic.

Though he is young,
he has dreamt the death
of those who came before him,
     a holocaust,
hecatombs of his brothers piled.
From bark and root he knows
all history, an acorn chronicle
dating to Titans and Olympians.

In sight of the great inland sea
there grows a most splendid chinar —
an ancient sycamore — round top
a perfect hemisphere, million-leafed,
green, yellow, brown branded bark smooth,
rain-swept to glossy sheen, proud tree
which in the warm Crimean clime
has grown to the height of giants of old.

It is a citadel and a city of birds,
an avian metropolis of a thousand songs.
Men honor it, and spare the axe
for under the shade of one such,
Hippocrates taught medicine, and Socrates
befuddled the mind of Plato!

“Tree of Wonder! Give me shelter!”
So speaks the pilgrim leaf at edge of shade,
begging a restful interlude from sun
and from the decaying elements. “Regard me
as one from the desolate North, too soon
apart from my oaken sire, too young
to know what fraught danger awaited me.

“I trusted the wind, defying gravity.
I have been taken I know not where.
Dried up, my strength has abandoned me.
One day among your wholesome leaves so green
I would pass in your kind shadow.
Tales I can tell them of wonders seen.”

The sycamore is silent. Birds sing
oblivious, obsessed with love and feeding,
feathers of every hue a-flutter among
the broad leaves and spreading branchlets.
One song he understands: a lark
goes on and on about a mermaid
it has seen within the nearby bay.

“That was no mermaid,” the oak leaf offers.
“Fair bird, it was a submarine, a thing of war.
Iron arrows it carries, and a wall of fire
it can unleash upon both forest and city.”
But on the lark sings, of a golden palace,
and talking fish in a jeweled sky.

“Tree of Wonder! Heed my warning!”
So speaks the rasping and withered guest.
“The sky is full of metal birds. Bombs fall
and flatten towns full of innocent people.
Lunatics rage. Wheeled juggernauts
stake out imaginary lines and kill
to defend them. Humans’ hot breath
has swept the Polar Regions and set alight
dry woods and wolds. The gods themselves
would have not meted out so cruel a thing,
as they would smite the smiter first. Instead,
every last shrub will be crushed beneath them.”

Finally, the sycamore replies,
in voice as sweet as the oak had been stern:
“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.
If some thieving wind tears off a leaf,
     or branch, I grow a new one.

“Nest-builders have many times told us
of dark times coming! Stupid birds!
Every hawk is the death of them.
‘End of the world!’ they chatter on,
endlessly migrating north and south,
never content with where they are.

“We have no need of your bad messages.
Perfect we are, and perfect we shall be.
Does not an ocean nourish our roots?
Is not the sky the biggest sky of all?
Are not my birds the biggest crowd ever?” —

“Tree of Wonder!” Please remember!
Have not wars come and gone? Have not
your kind been burned and plowed under?” —

“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.
Be on your way and find some other shelter.
Sun blesses me, rain falls on me, the moon
dashes up and over to lull my sleep. Begone,
you dusty and malformed, tawny orphan!”

“Fool!” cries out the oak leaf. “I flee
your hateful shade on the next breeze upwards.
Just as you shed your bark, so too
you shed all troubling memories,
as innocent of history as a new-born babe.”

All the high sycamore counters
is its same idiot refrain:
“Always have I been tall, and green, and free.”

Mikhail Lermontov’s short lyric poem, “An Oak Leaf,”(1841)  is famous. It personifies the poet as a drifting oak leaf, flying from Russia into the warm clime of Crimea (part of the poet’s military life). The mysterious tree Lermontov calls the “chinar” is not so exotic as it seems, for the chinar is the sycamore or plane tree, whose "Western" variety is now a common sight in parks, public places and streets. My goal in making a new English adaptation of a poem is to make it into something new, so here I have expanded Lermontov’s original and made the sycamore tree into a narcissist speaking lines out of today’s headlines. And the oak leaf carries a warning of climate change, the last thing Donald Sycamore wants to hear.

 

 

Of A Sudden

by Brett Rutherford

For days the monotonous

dog-bark next door

has begged for it,

and it has come.

My view from out

my kitchen window

which yesterday

was summer, now

trumpets October.

Overnight, this autumn

picked up its paints

and palette, lifted

a brush and swept

ochre and tan,

red flame and orange,

blanching the oak

to crisped hue.

Who summoned Fall?

The merely rustled leaves

of summer, rattle now

in sideways wind, as

handless umbrellas

scoot for the horizon.

Last week's firm asters

wither to paper thin;

no more the bees will deign

to pay them homage.

Squirrels dart paranoid,

hide winter larder

in our flower pots.

This being

an election year,

dark pests are everywhere,

lantern-flies belting

us like biblical locusts.

Look, friend, there's one!

Stamp underfoot,

as one might a Nazi.

Free leaves, refusing

the bad news of climate,

defy the sooty air,

torn loose, ejected,

or self-immolated

from too much bad

philosophy, go

to ground, to ground,

only to be swept away.

The sky hangs gray.

Clouds threat to sog

the encumbered earth.

Porch man ignores it all,

yells out to all who pass

dark prophecies

of guns and a dishonored

expresident, of plots

within plots within --

Who summoned Fall?

Whom should I thank

for this minor-key

symphony? I ask --

an owl "who"s back —

the question

is its own answer.

What is, is,

and what is not,

mere cobwebs

in a deluded brain.

October has come.

Summer is gone

as though it had not been.

Why do I so dread

the coming of November?

Sunset Rhapsody

by Brett Rutherford 

Eye-blinks,
brush-strokes,
things no sooner seen
than forgotten

unless
the words come,
or the brush speeds past
the drying of water
hastily, hastily
before it is gone —

Red light above,
black water below
horizon-sky.
Foreground of forest
some parts still lit,
some parts in silhouette —

Ravens on high,
arrowing about,
while in the hedge
one whippoorwill
stands still —

Gale-swept corn
tilts eastward,
sharp eyes peek red
in shrubbery
and under fallen
oak branches,
trees’ loss
their newfound
mansion —

The high grass moves.
The hare hides.
Snake closes
all-knowing eyes —

In twilit pines,
something is about,
hungry for flesh —
foxes bring down
a limping doe —

Bats swoop to scoop
the almost invisible
midge and gnat,
summer’s last harvest —

The spider laments
the coming snow,
web never big enough
to catch and keep
a full larder —

Moss, lichen,
mushroom, fern,
sleep, or die!
Rock shelter,
south-facing trunk,
warm rills
of water melting:
they will get by —

Maples, if you
could only hear them,
chatter with leaf and root:
“Frost coming!
Oh, what’s the use?”

Equinox, An Autumn Poem

by Brett Rutherford

The whole planet lights up.

It has a smoke.

It doesn't care

if it dies, lives

for the moment.

Peat, lumber, coal,

fracked gas and petrol,

dead leaves

and human ash

inhale and ex —

drill, baby

coughing its

sputter clouds,

smoke rings

to its last gasp,

melt-stained

with receding

glaciers, pimpled

with eruptions

of nickel-dime

volcanos;

killing its pets,

and setting fire

to its parent forests,

it is an addict,

indifferent;

its breath reeks,

the doom of carbon

exhuming itself

from the fossil record.

Is this what happens

on every Blue Planet?

Dancing on Autumn Leaves

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Emperor Li Yü, Poem 6

She has come, as I bid her,
to the unruly pavilion
where leaves and fallen petals
carpet her footsteps.

The sun is but three hours up
but still the Lovely One arrives,
a row of sleepy dancers
behind her,
suppressing laughter
as they move to no music,
but to the breeze itself,
the sway of pine branches.

I clap my hands.
She is a little drunk
from last night's merriment.
Her golden hairpin falls
and another must bow
to sweep it up for her.
Not quite so sure
of this step or that,
no tile or square to guide her,

she pretends to smell
an untouched flower,
     and just as well,
     as it is withered.
Fumbling, she tries again,
the wrong foot forward,

while I delight to hear
small feet unsure of step,
on autumn leaves arranged
by Master Wind.

Somewhere a flute and drum
strike up in another palace
(some being called
to early breakfast!)
Not for me, these sounds!
Shuffle, crackle,
slide, and spin,
whirl, little slippers, my
pantomimes of whim!

 

Awakening in Early Autumn

 by Brett Rutherford

(Adapted from Emperor Li Yü, Poem 5, to the tune of "Hsi Ch'ian Ying")

As my eyes open,
     the morning moon,
     pale crescent, sets.
Ashes remain;
     the incense smoke is gone.
Cold, too, the coals
     beneath the brazier --
I must wait for my tea.

Calling no one, I rest
     on this pillow and that,
remembering --

Who was I with? what
     was her name?
No matter! Right now
I have a craving
     for the scent of hay.

 Listen!
Off in the sky somewhere,
     swans weakly call.

Above me,
     on the lattice-work
     of cherry, the orioles
          hungry, unsatisfied,
dart off to fuller branches.

Chrysanthemums, those
     drooping dowagers,
          fade and fall.
No one is up. Later,
these garden embarrassments
will vanish, be sure!

Red maple leaves
     and desiccated petals
litter the enameled floor
     and clog the courtyard.

Sweet autumn carpet,
     crispèd and melancholy:
I shall have it left unswept.

I want to watch what
     the feet of dancers
          do to them.

 

September Sarabande

by Brett Rutherford

It is the night most singular,
alone of all the nights of the year,
when those who were loved
and those who truly loved them,
drift as ghosts in the grim dark.

Night-blooming jasmine smothers them,
as a blue moon makes blind their eyes.
Cruel fate torments them. No fingers
touch as, back to back, they dance
a silent sarabande, eyes to the ground.

The names they whisper, yearning,
are drowned by the night-sky’s wail,
as constellations from their dread
seducers flee, or from the wrath
of jealousy — even stars are denied
the company that most pleases them.

At dawn, they resume their places,
placid and cold beneath the ground,
side-by-side with detested partners,
head-to-foot with dreaded sires.

As burning sun warms up the stones
and the names and vows engraved
upon them, the dance is forgotten.
By name, by date, for all of time,
love’s crucifixion grinds on.

  

La sarabande de septembre

C'est la nuit la plus singulière,
seul de toutes les nuits de l'année,
quand ceux qui étaient aimés
et ceux qui les aimaient vraiment,
dérivent, fantômes dans l'obscurité sinistre.

Le jasmin nocturne les étouffe;
une lune bleue aveugle leurs yeux.
Le destin cruel les tourmente.
Pas de doigts toucher comme,
dos à dos, ils dansent une sarabande
silencieuse, les yeux baissés.

Les noms qu'ils chuchotent, désireux,
sont noyés par les gémissements
du ciel nocturne, tout comme
les constellations lointaines fuient
les ruses d'un séducteur,
ou la colère de jalousie
— même les étoiles sont refusées
les compagnons qui leur plaisent le plus.

A l'aube, ils reprennent leurs places,
placide et froid sous terre,
côte à côte avec des partenaires détestés,
cap à pied avec des parents redoutés.

Alors que le soleil brûlant
réchauffe les pierres
et les noms et vœux qui y sont gravés,
la danse est oubliée.

Par nom, par date, pour toujours,
la crucifixion de l'amour continue.

 

 

November Desolation

by Brett Rutherford

My heart is a cenotaph.
My undelivered love notes
go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
where a drab  clerk files them indifferently
in the room where the wilted roses go.

 Why? Because I finally burned your portrait,
consigning frame and glass to the dumpster,
ripping to shreds the returned letter
that had come back four years ago, stamped
Addressee Unknown, not forwarded.

 If I do not think of you before my
sleeping, perhaps you will now shun my dreams.
Go! Forget that you came to me one night
with everything you owned in a suitcase,
and how you stayed, no questions asked, until
my music dispelled your inner darkness,
and how you explained, “I slept-walk, I guess,”
when I once woke to find you beside me.

 Go! Go! and if you circle back again,
I am not so sure I will remember you.
I am getting on, you know, and such rooms
as are full of cobwebs and dried-up lusts
are less appealing now. My cancel stamp
has learned the use of Return to Sender.

The Fence (Anniversarius 26)

 

by Brett Rutherford

Town fathers, what have you done?
Last night I returned
(I vowed — I made the lake a promise)
intending to tramp the lane of maples,
read with my palms the weary tombstones,
feast with my eyes the clouded lake,
lean with a sigh on founder’s headstone,
chatter my verses to turtles and fish,
trace with my pen the day lily runes,
    the wild grape alphabet,
the anagram of fallen branches,
all in a carpet of mottled leaves.
The mute trees were all assembled.
The stones — a little more helter-
    skelter than before,
but more or less intact — still greeted me
as ever with their Braille assertions.
The lake, unbleached solemnity 
    of gray, tipped up
and out against its banks to meet me.
All should have been as I left it.

Heart sinks. The eye recoils.
    My joy becomes an orphanage
    at what I see:
from gate to bank to bend
    of old peninsula,
    across the lot 
    and back again,
sunk into earth
    and seven feet high
A CHAIN LINK FENCE!

Town fathers, what have you done?
Surely the dead do not require protection?

Trees do not walk.
    The birds are not endangered.
How have your grandsires sinned
    to be enclosed in a prison yard?
As I walk in I shudder.
    It is a trap now.
    A cul-de-sac.
I think of concentration camps.

For years, art students painted here —
    I hear the click of camera shutters,
    the scratch of pens,
    the smooth pastel caress,
    taste the tongue lick of water color,
    inhale the night musk of oil paints.
Poets and writers too,
    leaning on death stones
    took ease and inspiration here,
    minds soaring to lake and sky.
At dawn, a solitary fisherman
    could cast his line here.

Some nights the ground would undulate
    with lovers
(what harm? who now would take
    their joy between two fences?)

The fence is everywhere! No angled view
can exclude it. It checkerboards
the lake, the sky, the treeline.

They tell me that vandals rampaged here,
    knocked over stones,
    tossed markers
         into the outraged waves.
Whose adolescents did this,
    town fathers?
                   Yours.
Stunted by rock and stunned by drugs, 
they came to topple a few old slabs,
struck them because they could not 
         strike you.

Let them summon their dusky Devil,
rock lyric and comic and paperback,
blue collar magic, dime store demons —
                    they wait and wait,
blood dripping from dead bird sacrifice
until the heavy truth engages them:

The dead are dead,
    magic is empty ritual,
         and stubborn Satan declines
to answer a teen age telegram.

Fence in your children, not our stones!

— October 25, 1989, Edinboro, Pennsylvania

End of the World (Anniversarius 21)

 

by Brett Rutherford

Not with a trumpet
  but a whisper.  No angels
proclaimed the end. Prophets
with sandwich signs
 did not predict it.
No tea-leaf ladies
  or noted astrologers
knew that the end would come
at half-past eight
  in the morning.

It was a Monday,
  (of all days!)
catching them dressed
for their funerals.

Who would have guessed
that this October,
instead of leaves
the people turned
and blew away,
that gravity,
the faithful plodder,
would take a holiday?

First some commuters
on a platform in Connecticut
fell straight into a cloudless sky
trying to hook
  to lampposts and poles
with flailing arms.

Even the oversize stationmaster
was not immune,
hung by his fingertips
to shingled roof,
an upside-down balloon.
His wig fell down,
the rest of him 
shot shrieking upwards.

Slumlords in Brooklyn
dropped rent receipts,
clutched hearts and wallets
as they exfoliated,
burst into red and umber explosions
and flapped away.

A Senator stepped down
from his bulletproof limo,
waved to the waiting lobbyist,
  (sweaty with suitcase
   full of hundreds)
only to wither to leaf-brown dust,
crumbling within his overcoat.

Stockbrokers adjusted their power ties,
buttoned their monogrammed blazers,
pushed one another from narrow ledge
falling from Wall Street precipice
into the waiting sky,
printouts and ticker tapes,
class rings and credit cards
feathering back down.

Bankers turned yellow,
wisped out like willow leaf
from crumpled pin-stripe,
filling the air
with streamers of vomit
as they passed the roof
of the World Trade Center.

The colors were amazing:
black women turned ivory,
white men turned brown and sere,
athletes swelled up
  to fuchsia puffballs,
Asians unfurled
  to weightless jade umbrellas.

Winds plucked the babies from carriages,
oozed them out of nurseries,
pulled them from delivery rooms,
from the very womb —
gone on the first wind out and upwards.

They filled the stratosphere
darkened the jet stream,
too frail to settle in orbit,
drifting to airless space.

They fell at last into the maw
of the black hole Harvester,
a gibbering god
  who made a bonfire
  of the human host
the whirling spiral of skeletons
a rainbow of dead colors
red and yellow and black and brown
  albino and ivory
parched-leaf skins a naked tumble.

The bare earth sighed.
Pigeons took roost in palaces.
Tree roots began
the penetration of concrete.
Rats walked the noonday market.

Wild dogs patrolled
  the shopping malls.
Wind licked at broken panes.
A corporate logo toppled
  from its ziggurat.
Lightning jabbed down
  at the arrogant churches
  abandoned schools
  mansions unoccupied

started a firestorm
a casual blaze
as unconcerned
as that unfriendly shrug
that cleaned the planet.

 — October 31, 1987, Providence-New York

The State Versus Autumn (Anniversarius 17)

by Brett Rutherford

Resolved: For the sake of decency
and the order of the land,
the Congress hereby abolishes
the unwanted month of October...

No more Octobers ever?
Has the Society to Outlaw Gloom at last
succeeded in the Senate halls?
Has the Lobby Against Dead Leaves
banished arborial pollution?
No trees, no bees, no bugs, no squirrels:
a paradise in the suburbs!

Resolved: That the falling of leaves
disrupts the conduct of business,
distracts our children from their studies,
depresses the widowed and elderly...
We hereby outlaw deciduous trees.

How long, then, till the squad cars come
with their phalanx of armored cops,
handcuffing my corner sycamore,
chainsawing the neighbor’s rowan tree,
tearing the vagrant maple from the street,
screaming with bullhorns for the ailanthus
to disperse from hillsides and parking lots,
interrogating runaway saplings all night,
wresting confessions from an effeminate birch?

The casualties will mount beyond reckoning,
the loss of leaves beyond count,
numbers too large for a superchip
or the chambered cranium of a C.P.A.

It’s a conspiracy, of course:
the Moral Majority, the Vatican,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons,
an arm-in-arm league of Fundamentalists,
their hidden object a simple one:

Outlaw Halloween! They claim
the day is a Communist plot,
a pact of Satan and Hollywood,
Beelzebub and Publishers’ Row,
a turning of innocent youth from God,
an anarchist’s field day,
a sadist’s orgy of pin-filled apples
and candies injected with LSD.

An ominous van passes my house
and returns and passes again
and returns and passes again,
this way, that way, slowing.
A long camera lens points at my window,
scanning my bookshelves, alert
for subversive posters on my walls.
The vehicle's side are painted
GOD, GUNS & TRUMP on one side,
and on the other,

NO MORE DEVIL'S NIGHT:
MAKE JESUS-WEEN A HOLIDAY.

On Halloween, the faithful complain,
you cannot tell who the homosexuals are.
On Halloween, too much of the world
tilts to the literal Devil’s side.
We got to get that Dutch-boy white Jesus
and his lambs, Wise Men and Virgins,
angels and all their kin on the sidewalks,
scarfing up candy so the dusky children
of heathen devils get no handouts ever.

The bill has amendments, of course.
It will be a felony to serve up Poe
to those of tender and gullible age.
Horror books and movies? Goodness, no!
Bradbury’s tales, and Brahms’ autumnal tones,
LeFanu and Bierce, Blackwood and James,
Hawthorne and Derleth, Leiber and Bloch,
a whole amendment proscribing Stephen King,
real or pseudonymous, and prison for life
for reading Lovecraft and his protégés!

And so, a stitch in time is made.
September’s harvest blinks
     to Jesus-Ween
and suddenly it's November
     prelude to winter’s barren hills.

October 1 to October 30 have vanished!
A month of mail will never be delivered.
Today at work, a marshal comes to my desk,
tears page after page from my calendar.

Now someone is blacking out words in the library books.
The date of my birth no longer exists.
There is gunfire outside the library.
All night I smell the paper burning.
As I read my on-line bibliography,
someone is back-space deleting lines
before my very eyes.

These politicians mean business!

 — September 1985/ October 1986, Providence RI/
Revised November 13, 2021.

October Is Coming! (Anniversarius 16)

 

by Brett Rutherford

1

Listen! There is a sudden pause
between my words and the surrounding
silences: no breeze, no hum
of street lamps, no tread of tire —
even the birds have missed a beat.
It is the first self-conscious tinge
of maple leaf red, the first
night-chill of the season.
It is the caesura of equinox —
it whispers a prophecy:
October is coming.

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from the things that bind you.
You will follow a strange wind northward.
You will tread the edge of glaciers
  and blush with the iron tinge of destiny.
You will come to earth in a strange place
where you will be known as a leaf from an alien tree
    and be feared for it,
where you will seek the tongue-touch of another
    rasping exile — and find it.

Not for you the comfort of old trees,
    old branches, old roots — 
now at last the buoyant freedom of the nearly
    weightless,
the eyrie-view above pine-tops, eddied above
    rain troughs and lightning rods,
bird-free,

drifting ghostlike and invisible on graveyard mound,
grazing the cheeks of grievers, pausing
    upon the naked backs of lovers,
tracing the mysterious barricades between 
    the kingdoms of strays,
colliding with children in their chaotic play — 

Hearing at night with brittle ears the plaintive sea,
    the wearing away of shoreline,
the woeful throb of the requiem of whales,
the madrigal of feeding gulls, the thrust beat
    of the albatross in its pinioned flight,
the hideous slurring of squids,
the inexorable gnashing of the machinery of sharks —

Mute, passive, dumb as a dead leaf 
    you shall hear them all —

You shall move among the avalanche of first snow,
amazed at the shattering of perfect ice,
its joyous crystalline tone as it falls,
the utterly new dimension of its remaining,
endlessly crushed and compacted and moved,
singed to a fog and sublimed away
as if it had never been, while you
still lay like an old coat in a hamper —
grayer, crisper, more decrepit than ever.

And you suspect your lingering immortality —
a leaf, a brittle parchment that no one can read,
a shard, a skeleton of cellulose,
a thread, a string, a lichen roost, a bird-nest lining,
a witness of ever-advancing decay and assimilation,
by becoming nothing, becoming everything.

2

Yet this is such an insubstantial fate.
I can think of it now in the context 
    of this human frame,
hands to write it, lips to speak it
    as transcendental prophecy.
Not only the dead but the living
can pass to this realm beyond matter.
All who have lived or ever will are there already
but only one in a thousand suspects it.

Why, then, do I crave for touching,
for arm-enfolding tenderness on winter nights?
Why do I ache for the line of a slender neck,
a moist surrender, the firmness of flesh,
the drumbeat sonnet of another’s heart
loud in my ears, the harmony
of pacing my breath to another’s breath,
falling limbs entwined into a trusting sleep, 
or waking first and thanking the gods
for this wall of life between me and uncertainty?

I do not know, except that love
is the fluid of the Muses,
the enhancer of meaning, chariot of purpose,
that one plus one is not two
    but infinity,

that entropy, this modern malaise
    of the wasting leaf
is the false side of the coin of nature —
base metal welded to hidden gold.

3

Listen! October is coming!

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from your ease and comfort
by the one who loves you. You will follow
a strange wind northward, not as surrender
to an autumn urge, but as a warrior
for Spring. Glaciers will shudder back
at the green fringe of your beard. Your smile
will make strangers trust you, ask to know
what manner of tree sends youthful emigrants —
even the dry-leaf exiles will stir at your arrival.

You shall not pass the winter in random flight,
    nor cling to the steeples and chimney-tops.

Not for you the graveyard and its lying testaments,
not for you the vicarious touching of lovers and losers —

All shall know you and say of you:
Here is the one who loves and risks all.
You shall not heed the devious sea
and the night-call of Neptune’s ravenous hosts.
The owl, the raven, the whippoorwill,
    the squirrel, the cat, the sparrow
shall teach you the ways of their defiance of season,
their hidden thrust for continuance.

Boisterous, active, strident as a new tree
    you shall take root again,
defying the shadow master of winter,
    the devil of frost,
refusing to yield one leaf to the ache-long nights.

And you rejoice in your numbered mortality,
in love, at risk of happiness for a single embrace,
at risk of loss and denial, too —
but knowing it and caring not.

A love, an eye, a heart, a hand,
a witness to ever advancing hope,
one to the power of infinity —
one plus a fraction, approaching,
but never reaching, duality.

4

Which shall it be? This orient autumn
or this renascent spring? This painless slide
into the lush oblivion of ash, or wing beat
in Daedalus flight to a promised star?

I only know that October is coming.
It will not be like any other October.

 — September 1985, Providence, RI

Green Things Are Melancholy (Anniversarius 12)

Some say these winter hills are sad.
I think not so. 

              Gray bark and snow
are just the world in homespun clad,

plain and simple, honest and bare
to branch and root,
                  dry underfoot —
these are the ones who do not dare

rebellion or unruly flight.
The withered sleep,
                  the dream they keep,
to them is wisdom’s light.

Green is the melancholy hue:
seedling and twig,
                blossom and sprig,
rioting upward, askew,

climbing aslant in May’s folly
following one
             devious sun—
how can this be melancholy?

Just ride the suicidal breeze:
seed-spewing trees,
                 lecherous bees,
the wingèd birds’ hypocrisies —

These are false harbingers of joy.
What use are they?
                Their vernal play
is but a manic’s  fevered ploy.

Wait till the frost arrives — what then?
The birds fly south.
                  The wizened mouth
of fruit and flower saddens men

With bitter kisses youth should scorn —
the chill and numb
                  chrysanthemum
as blanched and dry as ravaged corn —

The maples shorn have been undone —
the barren vine
              a twisted line
of snake embracing skeleton —

The lily stalks are cripple canes.
The pale worm flees
                   the apple trees.
A gray mist fills the lanes.

Green is the hue
          betraying you
for a handful of earth
         or a moment of dew!

 — December 17, 1978, New York; revised 1981, 1993, rewritten in 1995.

A rare example of a Rutherford poem that rhymes.

October Reckonings (Anniversarius 9)

The seasons merge: from a sunless autumn,
to winter without snow. What month it is,
is anybody’s guess. The yard goes dry,
the grapes cut back turn brittle; brown
sparrows tramp noisily for last desserts
on arbor top; ailanthus arms take on
a sere and whiter hue, no trace
of tropic sprays of verdure now, no flag
like native trees, of where the green had been
(perhaps they migrate and plant themselves
on other trees!) It is a time
of reckonings, to heap the harvest up
and count each gain against its cost.


Little it means to measure what was lost —
the never had’s a finer feast to sup.
It has a wine (whoever sees
the cask forgets himself and imitates
its salty plaint) from where the grapes had been,
of tears and rust and vanities, no flag
sincere of deeds or worth, no brace
of reason’s air; drinking us in it sprouts
its arrows from inside our hearts.
It speaks of love, its tendrils crown
arbors without leaves. What year is it?
All lonely autumns are alike
at winter’s verge.


— December 19, 1976, New York

This poem is a "mirror." The second stanza attempts, loosely, to write "backwards," echoing lines, sounds, and construction from the first stanza. Thus, the opening phrase "The seasons merge" shows up at the very end of stanza 2 as "at winter's verge." The final line of stanza 1, "and count each gain against its cost" becomes the first line of stanza 2 as "Little it means to measure what was lost." Even the actions in stanza 2 are backwards: arrows sprouting from inside hearts, a feast with an empty wine cask that drinks in the reveler, tendrils on a leafless arbor. Lack is everwhere from the first stanza: sunless autumn, snowless winter.

I Persist in Green

Here on this hill there was no blossom time.
Though all was green, no nectar bee went forth
to fetch his fellows for a harvesting.
The scavengers give me a bleak report,
avoid my limbs where neither fruit nor nut
nor even bitter berries fall to ground.
I wait, still green with poetry, still wrapped
this autumn in dreams of Eden’s April.
I am denied the killing kiss of frost —
one of a kind, I must stand sentinel,

 watching as all the other trees go gray,
stripped bare by teasing wind, their naked arms
a stark and spindly silhouette on clouds.
I listen to their brittle colloquy,
see through and beyond their herded huddling
the universe their summer glyph concealed.

 The sun and stars have dragged the fruiting urge
to climes unseen, but I persist in green.
I wave my rustling, needled arms aloft,
exude a youthful fragrance, still let the sap
fill my old head with springtime dalliance. 

I call in thousands of lonely sparrows,
converse with the unwanted beggar birds,
invite the nests of those who stayed behind,
ignoring the season’s bleak intelligence.
Stay here, hawk-free and sheltered from the storm!
Our wormless winter, though lean as a bone,
is spent with friend and feather, not alone.

 Should I envy the others — the red-flagged
maples, the golden willows, browning oaks?
Is nakedness to wind more honest, then?
Are roots more wise when bald of leaves above?

Look at those tattered and abandoned nests!
Read me — my rings can prove and testify
whose way of wint’ring is the better lot!

 The slanting, icy sun accuses me,
fringes with frostbite my emerald crown.
No fevered red, no golden rash, no brown
of rust has marred me — let winter come!
Should I not fear the hubris-humbling flood,
the thrust of fire from angry thunderers?

 Am I too boastful of my isolate,
self-centered endurance? No god has come
to topple me, no hatchet-man has climbed
to mark or cut me for cabin timber.

 One thing there is that can make me tremble:
I have dreamt of the distant mountain range,
of hill beyond hill, and peak surmounting
peak, of crags an eagle dares not soar to,
of nameless unscaled turrets of granite.
On each there grows, as here, an untamed tree,
alone and defiant,  giant and free.

 I dream, too, of an alpine wanderer,
whom I have ever loved, though never seen.
I bloom before the Passionate Stranger,
whose words bring news of my exiled brethren;
I bear strange fruit that falling, speaks and sings
new wonders to the astonished sparrows.
Then I blush red and amber and ochre,
shrugging my leaf-fall in a cry of joy.

 We hold a strange communion, traveler
and tree. Kings of our kind, we cannot bow,
but lean into the wind together, twined
till cloth and bark, flesh and root-tap mingle.
To him, I make the wind that is Autumn;
to me, he makes the hope that will be Spring.
Holding dead leaves in one another’s palms,
we are the sum of blossom, pollen, seed and fruit.
We are the thing we loved, the self made whole
by loss of self in love’s surrendering.

 — December 1973, Edinboro, Pennsylvania; rewritten in 1995