The Dark One

by Brett Rutherford

In memory of Scott Forsgren

We laughed in the graveyard
I wrote into poems and he
traced out in pen-and-ink.
His fingers raked earth
in the lake-shore hillside
until a bone that might have been
Jeannette Culberton’s finger
came to light, his trophy.

He walked one summer night
across the college campus
not knowing anyone, migraine
vision colliding with my identical
pain and misery. Two weeks
he stayed; like brothers we shared
a chaste bond, not to be broken.
I could not go home to parents;
something had riven him likewise
from home and family. Wagner
and Schubert, Mahler and Bach
bonded us. Moonlight and lake
and the transcendent stars
were our true homeland.
Some friendships
are instant, and last forever.

I moved to New York. I heard
he was swept away by religion,
at least for a while, and then
I heard no more of him.

Decades later, at a college reunion
for those of the Woodstock years
I heard it said casually
that he had drowned himself,
rock-weighted, self-hurled
from the top of a bridge.

In mind’s eye I saw
his weighted jacket,
the too-deep water,
the ignominy of a found body,
the pointless inquest,
the baffled, pained, guilty faces
of the left-behind.

I left the reception,
closed tight the door
of the cinder-block dorm
and wept uncontrollably.
That half-an-hour’s grief
should be enough for anyone,
but it did not abate.

What was the use of his death
except to those who stand and weep —
who must, in one life,
fill, and refill the cup of grief,
so early, and so many times?

What would I not have given to save him?
Why is self-murder a crime against the living?

If only magic could bring him back,
I would sit with ring and book
until the world collapsed
into its core of iron,
until the loam of the soil parted
and his dark laughter exploded
from his unremembered grave!

If only souls were immortal!
(The heart breaks, wishing it were so,
hoping to force from nature
what it cannot give).

If my hand raked soil
to touch the tip
of his dead fingers,
it would be our first
and only caress.

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

The Secret of the Lake

 

by Brett Rutherford

Edinboro Lake, PA 

Day after day the sodden sky refills the lake, quenches the thirsty graveyard with migrant tears returning to the eye that wept them.

The used and tattered rainclouds come here like derelicts, like old dogs homing, revisiting one place — one secret lake which has berthed all waters (sea to sky to drawing mountain peak in flash of storm-drop —  this unassuming kettle of liquid clouds, gray-black beneath   the lidded heavens, shimmers at night  under the nodding Dipper,  the stars that empty it  of excess rainfall.

Now I come back to you, wait for respite of thunder, tread mud, walk flooded grass to the neglected graveyard, hark to the wind waves at your overfilled edge, the lapping song of your careworn banks, the hollow silence of your glacier-ground heart.

Elms and maples stand sentry. The ground is a riot of toppled tombstones, limbs torn by gale or lightning thrust, fence pickets torn off by age or vandals. The winds — or cautious townsmen —  have removed the old gray trunk that hoarded the shore like a sentinel (how its unmoving spindle arms alarmed the midnight visitor! how ravens and owls perched there to read the runes of the waveforms, the prophecy of wind and season! how poets and lovers sought it, the artist’s brush absorbed it as silhouette defining the lake beyond!)

I miss that tree. If one of the graves should vanish I would not miss it so much as that withered guardian.

It was the life work of a living thing, an epic of cambium in heartwood. Its wisdom was sublimated from soil, drunk from the lake of all waters, tapped from the abundance of sunlight, shielded from frost and lightning fire. It made itself sculpture, transcended its own passing, a defiant singularity, useless, unwanted, beautiful.

I shed my clothes to wade in the lake, letting the chill-cold waters accept me, sinking until the rippled plane of water licks at my shoulders, pacing with caution the rubble and sand of the lakebed. Not for a decade have I touched these waters, communed with the throwaway songs of the bullfrogs, the chirl of crickets, the paper-thin presence of curious insects, the nudge of fishes at my knees, the velvet black flurry and sonar symphony of the bats.

Cars hiss by on the distant roadway. House lights blink out. Water goes lull, takes on the hues of blueberries ripening — black and gray and Prussian blue.  The loudest of sounds  is the breath in my lungs, my voice as I call to you, lake of my youth: Remember me.

I too have come back to this navel of the world, this womb of the waters, this quencher of age and weariness.

Finally, your secret is revealed to me in God’s Eye weave of the thread of time:

The Eries came here for a winter festival, carried a gourd with the old year’s sadness, weighted it with stone, canoed and dropped it at your quiet center,  singing—

Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows — Heed not the crane, the fish, the deceitful song of the serpent — Heed us, mother of tears and rivers. We bring you a gourd, the gourd our ancestors taught us to make. Surely you are hungry, O Lake. We have come many days to offer it,  suffered such dangers to please you!

Calmly the lake accepted the present. The gourd sank fast and never returned. In silence, the men returned to the shore, banked their canoes and shouted with glee:

Jiyathontek! O Konneahti! Onenh, wete-wenna-keragh-danyon! Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows! Today we have made the signs. Again you ate the gourd and the stone. You did not know the gourd was hollow. You did not ask what was in it! Do not inquire, O Lake our mother.  We have promised never to tell you!

The gourd had passed a year in the longhouse. Each mother who lost an infant held it until the stream of her tears had dried. The father who watched the forest trail for the sight of the hunting party clenched it and wept for his eldest son. (They spoke of wolves at the council fire.)

In years of war or famine the gourd was heavy. Women put beads or locks of hair inside it, stained it with rust and blueberry paint. Feeble ones took it when their memory failed; it calmed the mad to sleep beside it.

Unburdened now of the Gourd of Sorrows, the Eries leave the forgiving lake, wash off their paint, their red-brown faces young with laughter and courage, their eyes as bright as the ardent sun, their strong legs running, running.

 

A Wing of Time (2019 version)

by Brett Rutherford

This little "Twilight Zone" episode narrative poem has me going back in time in 1973, revisiting the college town where I lived from 1965 to 1969. Ironic now that I felt "so much older."

This village street will always split me —
     half in the gray-fringed present,
     half quarked away in time
from dull today to that brilliant
     yesterday — a day I am not yet
     twenty and the maples seem shorter,
          the houses whiter, the sky
a bluer blue through eyes unclouded.

I stand before a dingy storefront.
Back then it was a dress shop
     with but a single mannequin.
Next to it was Gorman’s
     steamy laundromat
churning students’ underwear and towels,
a nickel-dime-quarter juggernaut
devouring stray socks, a treasuryof  lint and buttons.

Above the laundry, beyond that rotting
window-frame, was my first apartment.
Was it fifteen dollars a month I paid
for two converted office rooms,
     a hallway bathroom and shower?
Are those the same curtains still,
tattered and colorless as I found them
and left them? The same glass,
certainly, through which I watched
the leaf-fall, lightning, snowstorm,
the neon light of the Hotel Bar
(no one under twenty-one admitted!)

I see the pale green painted wall
not changed in grudging landlord years.
I climb the narrow stairs, pass down
the beer-corroded corridor to my door,
whose frosted glass was once gold-leafed
with some insurance agent’s name.

Do I do this? Are my hand, nervous,
solid enough to knock, or am I dreaming?
My tap on the glass is solid enough.
A thin blond woman answers, puzzled.
I tell her I lived her as a student,
     oh, many years ago.
Could I just stand here a moment,
look out her window at the village green? —

where someone, in unintended irony,
has placed the town’s own name
in giant wooden letters,
     as though the inhabitants
     needed to be reminded,
the traveler admonished.
Sinners, this is Edinboro!
Fathers, guard your daughters!

A wave of heat rolls through the trees outside.
Were it a wing of Time, whose darker side
enfolds the past, what memories appear?
I see the vanished store whose wooden frame
extends into the square, a blur of green
as sycamores sawed down or thunderstruck
burst back to view. A sigh of life unfurls,
the lake regains its water lily bloom,
long-dead sparrows rebuild forgotten nests,
and on the street, departed friends go by —


Squat Bertha goes to get her mail. Next door,
her restaurant slides to bankruptcy,
unpaid employees and a sheriff’s sale.
I heard her scold her harried waitresses
for wasting moldy pie. Do it like this! —
she flipped the pie-slice over deftly
then scraped a knife across the furry crust,
flipping it back to who would ever know —
now serve it with a smile! Above her store, 
she had her quart of beer, remembering
the brothel she ran in her Erie days.
The men in her rooms are boarders, students.
Deans and professors eat at her table.
Head high, she’s almost respectable now.

I see four shadows in the alleyway —
three high school boys and a slow-minded girl.
She goes there often. They catch her there,
against the wall their prying hands adept
at raising her skirt, stealing quick pleasure.
After the shadows mingle, pressed on brick,
sneakered feet scatter in every direction.  

Outside the bar, the college boys loitering
swoon as Jamie and her sketchpad pass them.
Her tied-back hair jet black, her almond eyes
Eurasian orbs of challenge and surrender.
Her breasts move through their dreams 
          like wrecking cranes.
Her siren silhouette, voice-song, Muse-call,
perfect things, untouchably sufficient.
It was enough that she existed here.

Now others pass: a student prince who died
in megalo-brainfire tumor madness;
the tragic bronchial artist coughing,
imagining consumption’s early death;
one, two, a half dozen for Vietnam,
whose jungles would cripple them, or kill them
(one whose body was never found, looks up
as though his ghost and my vision had locked);

my best friends, the mad and sad ones, strolling
on by as though I still awaited them —
the best of their time, the dreamer drop-outs,
acid, depression, poverty and war
cutting its swath through my generation.
In this interval a hundred have passed,
known and unknown, the loved and the yearned-for,
all of them still before their beginnings,
not drinking the poison of compromise,
not marrying lies, denying visions,
not using youth to engender monsters.
They do not see my future looking down,
not one of them seems coarse or mediocre.

And there, impossibly, I see myself,
a younger form, approach.
He is by all standards, pretty much
     out of his mind.
His eyes are wide with poems.
He turns and looks back at passers-by
if they happened to have beautiful eyes.
He is carrying a batch
     of his underground newspaper
     giving them out     
          to everyone he recognizes.
He enters through the door below,
his footsteps sure upon the stair.
I turn, I dash into the darkened hall.
I hide in the bathroom until he passes,
then tread my way silently
to the street, and to the present..

He only cares about the future.
I wish I could warn him.
I think he was very foolish
    to linger here,
as I was foolish to return.

Yet this is what I learned:
I always thought others the meteors,
racing on by, too hot to touch,
never quite seen or palpable.
I thought the world a-spin
away and beneath my grasp,
yet here it sits, slow in its orbit
as a banana slug.
And now I understand:
I was the meteor. I am the meteor.
I blaze through. Nothing remains
of me but these etched words.

1796 Edinboro Lake

by Brett Rutherford

Off the Venango path and north
of the place called Cussewago, they found  (1)
the uninhabited lake. What did it look like then?
Crammed to its edge with ancient trees
a woods in perpetual dusk where one
could walk for three days before
another cabin smoked out in a clearing.
Here and there along the way
some rotted, roofless ruin lay
where an Erie long-house had been,
or a mound mysterious full of arrow-heads,
a place whose people had vanished,
driven by the Canada’s enraged Hurons
into extinction. No more Eries, no more
this lake a place of winter refuge.
It was empty, and waiting.

So why not claim it? Why not this lake,
so like the lochs of Scotland, why not
this man, John Culberston, Scot-born
but free? From Philadelphia west
he had come; he had weathered out
that Britain-versus-America problem
and it was time to put down roots.
Why not this kettle lake, carved out
of the underlying rock by the glaciers?
The Indian, a Mingo, had told him
about this place, and called it
Conneautee. So here it was,
just as the guide had promised,
a placid little loch just half a mile
across, with pines enough around
to build a town, flat land for grain,
and for the grist mill he would build;
for grain and whisley were the way
to wealth. “What think
you, wife?” he asked his silent consort.

Jeanette took in the sweep of clouds,
the sky-enfolding blue waters, watched
as a flock of crows cawed and winged
welcome. “I like it,” she said.
The half-naked Indian grunted.
If he knew more about the place,
he said nothing. The dark swamp
nearby was well concealed by trees
and the nodding cat-tails. (No need
to upset them about what lived there
and how no one slept well
on certain nights when sorrow
rose like a beast from the bottom!)
Man, woman, horses and wagon
stood for a long time, the little clouds
of their breathing in chill air
as calm as a peace pipe.
Everything they owned,
     they had dragged here.

Down at the lake-edge
their shiny boots ground
time-worn gravel beneath them.
They knew nothing of Ice Ages,
departing glaciers and porous
limestone. They did not know
how shallow the soil was, how brief
the growing season, how deep
the snows piled on in winter,
a place where frost came in August
and snow remained till May.

Still, nothing could be worse
than Scotland: this they would say

on all the winter nights to come.

They canoed to the north, reed grass
and full of inlets, fish abounding,
fens buried in mists, tall pines bent
and fallen to the earth. Something
had walked here unhappily, storms
called down in its anger. Pray
that its time has come and gone!

Pools dank with toads alternated
with blue patches herons favored.
Fog started there, it seemed.
The dusk-mist that rose
around them thickened.
Only the warm spot of sunglow
guided them back again.

And then they found the creek,
the lake’s shallow outlet,
good land on either side
for houses, a place to dam up
and run his mill. All good,
it seemed. “This is home,”
he said to his wife, “now
and for all the time we have left.”

“There’s no church,” she worried.
“Oh that will come,” he answered.
“There will be no stopping them.”
“What shall we call the place?”
“Edinburgh.” He said. “The only city
worth its name in all of Scotland.”

The sun set, the swamp exhaled
its methane-rich vapors, the frogs
began their melancholy chorus.
Back at the lake-edge vantage,
they made their tent, their fire
the first that the land had seen
in over a hundred years.

They did not dream that night,
but something in and under them
dreamt of their lives and deaths,
their burials on this very ground,
the slow seep of waters upwards,
an inverse sun rising
in the names of their children to come.
______

Note 1: Cussewago was the Indian name for Meadville, PA.

1973, rev. December 2019, Rev April 2020

Let Winter Come (Anniversarius VII)

I have been here a quarter century —
now let me rest! let my contrary self
be silent this once — this year
no fancy from my leafy quill.
The lake will still eat leaves without my lines;
the unacknowledged cold drops to the bone
from dawn of equinox whether or not
some gloomy choral anthem welcomes it.

Hear me, friend: I will not send you dead trees,
the frost no longer colors me orange.

I dodge the four winds’ summonings, evade
the draft of winter’s war, refuse this time
to slurry down autumn with napalm frost.

Although I turn the page, my pen is dry.
Whole forms no spring can disinter
scream past me into shallow graves —
leaf-flake will go to vein and then to dust,
love that once sprung from vernal lust dies off
to tumble-leaf gravid forgetfulness.
With summer gone, the past is verdigris;
broken-off promises to peeling rust;
to the boneyard with your false embraces,
to kettle-pot sky, your terrified flight —

Leave me then; I shall be silent as frost,
sliding down autumnless to sudden snow,
ghostless too on whisper-still All Souls’ Eve,
droop-walking sans pumpkins and tilted corn,
thanks-hymnless on harvest feast day, chiding
the moon to tick in slug-down count to twelfth-
month solstice and a muffled caroling.

Let winter come, if it must. I grow old
in these leaves, like an old mattress this ground
has humored me. The muffled maple-leaf
carpet accepts my tread without addressing me.

The Muse of the acorn is baffled by silence.
Ye Maple Giants, what is there to sing?
I walk by their houses; those whom I love
fold into the shadows with their lovers.
I window-watch until the blinkout freezes me.

Why do the hanging bats look down at me
that way? Why do the squirrels pause just
long enough when I see them, eye-contact
asking me why I have nothing to say?

Why, leaves, do you windlessly follow me,
clinging to my shoes and to trouser cuffs,
skittering across the bridge before me,
laughing at my failed romance, shivering
me into this my single bed and book?

Poor leaf in my pale hand, do you wonder
why in this gloom I will not write of you?
I press you to my cheek, cool, damp, and red.
You know me too well, my only friend now,
you know at the end I will not scorn to love you
though I protest my loneliness tonight.
The tree that bore you knows I will seek it,
that I will come to lean against its trunk,
waiting for dawn in the lake-edge snowing.

Bereft of leafage and loved ones, we’ll watch
as lying Venus casts her pall on ice.
Why write a song that none will ever sing,
or poems that make their object
    run for the horizon?

Leave me, autumn! Silence, ye wanton winds!
Abandon, birds, these wrinkled, wretched trees!
Here are the pen, the ink, and the paper,
   the empty virgin expanse, pale yellow —
   the ruled lines pulling me down like magnets —
No! no! I have nothing at all to say —
and I will not, will not write this poem.


 — 1972, New York; revised 1983,1995, 2019

The Pumpkined Heart (Anniversarius III)

Somewhere, the moon is red and cornstalks lean
with the wind in plucked fields. Not in New York,
city of bleached stone and desperate trees,
is my long walk of haystacks, fog in ascent,
not where traffic sings its sexless honking
can anyone mark the dim-out of frogs,
the dying-off of dragonfly wingbeats.

I am pulled up — I levitate, October-tugged,
away from the rat-doomed isle of Hudson,
clearing the water tanks and steeple-tops,
held fast on course by Orion’s glimmer,
the angry scorpion tail fast behind me.
With leaves and dust I fly to my lake shore,
to the pumpkined heart, the base and the root,
the earth I touch as pole and battery.

I love this village, though it loves not me;
remember it, though it erases me.
I mark in my life, how I bear and remember 
Octobers, and I know that a year is judged
by how it dies in these treetops: if it is burned
to cloud the eyes of men, or if it lies, burst
red in its full regale, waiting for snow,
         and the worms
and the spring, yes, to feed a new sun!

Earth, I am an ochre sheet of your leaves,
leaves more frequent than men in my lines,
leaves more fertile than mothers can be, leaves,
red, yellow, ambitious, how you have crept!
Leaves who have chilled my undraped lovers at night,
leaves sharing graveyard solemn caress with my lips,

leaves recurring everywhere to say their red gossip,
leaves for all I know returning again to this Fall,
    to this place, still blushing to recount
    how lovers were spent in their bed,
    leaves forever spelling the name of lost love!

You names that rise to my lips on October nights,
     you sleep-thieving echoes of aspirant heart,
     rise from the sealed tomb of years, drag shroud,
     where no leaves chatter nor branches impede
     dead, in the track of stalking remembrance — you
     who wake me alone in my grave, grave bed to recall
          each passionate urge from green twig.

Each, each and all have grown red, 
     defiant in the drugged fall,
denying parentage in terrible wind, 
     nonetheless breaking free,
falling to my fever in your high flame,  
     red, then wet,
moist in your somber dissent, then dry, then dead,
then in my hand the brown dust     
     that a seed should come to,
a leaf forever spelling the name of lost love!

Revised 9/6/2019.

Anniversarius 44: At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit this early poem, "October 1967" from The Pumpkined Heart. We all thought the world was coming to an end soon. The Vietnam War divided the country. People were threatening "hippies" with violence. In this "nature poem," written amid the violence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, about the remembered lake and the carillon music from the bell tower, I felt the isolation and anxiety.

Edinboro State College's carillon bells (real or a recorded) could be heard from afar. I remember going to class hearing "Musetta's Waltz," and coming out of class in the dark hearing Anton Rubinstein haunting melody, "Kammenoi Ostrow." The memory of the Rubinstein music against a fall-winter horizon bleak enough to be Russian, stayed with me.

Now I have rewritten this and added some current allusions, so that it is of 2018, although 95% of the poem is my 20-year-old voice speaking with the trees. This poem had been excluded from my Anniversarius autumn cycle, but this revision is now counted as part of that grouping. [Revised and expanded again, May 2019.]


ANNIVERSARIUS 44: AT THE LAKE'S EDGE

by Brett Rutherford

Scorched by the blind frost, the maple leaves die,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag. They are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of all identity,
chopped to mulch for next year’s gardens.

Bird flocks rise up in arrow-shaped vectors,
riding the west winds out to escape us.
Leaves fall; they flee.

                                 While all this leaf-holocaust,
this flee-to-south abandonment
by nations of bird flocks goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps every lone cornstalk
and the dried-out irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?

Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through the tree-bared acres at the line
of dark and leaden pines, black silhouettes
bold in the slanting dusk. A warning take
from the wind’s disconsolate sigh; no hope
can they gain from the coming election.

Death weaves through the browning, rigid cat-tails.
Brittle they lean, seed-shorn and childless now
that the swamp has been drained; their realm will end
at a gravel barricade, a concrete wall
no seed can scale, nor root circumference.

The blasted oak tree wears its own dead leaves,
a bearded miser, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers wait,
silent steel mastodons at glacier’s edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.

You and I are not part of them. A third
of the poor insects are already gone.)

From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kommenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.

I go to the graveyard’s shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,

tree-fathers as old as any tombstone here.
A few yellow leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a sly dust-devil.

They will return with me to join

my curiosity cabinet

of well-preserved loves, and gelled high moments.

Autumn is not and never will be

an ending. Autumn piled up on itself

is a bottomless leaf-pile. Oh, plunge in!

Stand here still hearing the dying bell-tone,

as a wind that tasted tundra slaps

your face awake with icy needles.

Kammenoi Ostrow fades to silence.

Where does one make a stand for life?

There is nothing to the north of you,

and little cause to bird-flee southward.

This is the edge of the world.

This is where the first snow falls.

Subjects: Edinboro, Kammenoi Ostrow, autumn poems




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC8ah61cMNw

At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit up this early poem, "October 1967" from The Pumpkined Heart. We all thought the world was coming to an end soon. The Vietnam War divided the country. People were threatening "hippies" with violence. In this "nature poem," written amid the violence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, about the remembered lake and the carillon music from the bell tower, I felt the isolation and anxiety. 
Edinboro State College's carillon bells (real or a recorded) could be heard from afar. I remember going to class hearing "Musetta's Waltz," and coming out of class in the dark hearing Anton Rubinstein haunting melody, "Kammenoi Ostrow." The memory of the Rubinstein music against a fall-winter horizon bleak enough to be Russian, stayed with me.
Now I have rewritten this and added some current allusions, so that it is of 2018, although 95% of the poem is my 20-year-old voice speaking with the trees.  This poem had been excluded from my Anniversarius autumn cycle, but this revision is now counted as part of that grouping. [Revised and expanded again, May 2019.]

ANNIVERSARIUS 44:
AT THE LAKE'S EDGE

by Brett Rutherford

Scorched by the blind frost, the maple leaves are dead,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag, or they are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of identity,
chopped to mulch for next year's garden.


Bird flocks rise in arrow-shaped vectors,
riding the west winds up to escape us.
Leaves fall; they flee.


While all this leaf-holocaust
this flight-to-south abandonment
by nations of birds goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps cornstalk
and the irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?


Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through tree-bared acres 
to the dark line of leaden pines,
mark how the shadows grow bold in the slanting dusk
(it is a warning!), mark how the wind
now sighs like one who cannot be consoled
by hopes about the coming election. Death
weaves through the browning, rigid cat tails.
Bored, they lean sere and childless
by the drained swamp; soon their roots
will meet a gravel barricade, soon
water drained, a concrete wall no seed
can scale, nor root circumference.


The blasted oak wears its dead leaves
as a stubborn beard, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers
wait like mastodons at glacier-edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.
You and I are not part of them, and a third 
of the insects are already gone.)


From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kammenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.
I go to the shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,
sere fathers as old as any gravestone here.
A few leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a defiant dust-devil.
They will return with me
to join my curiosity cabinet
of preserved loves, gelled moments.

Autumn is not and never will be
an ending. Autumn piled on itself
is a bottomless leaf-pile. Plunge in!
Stand here amid the dying bell-tone,
as wind that tasted tundra slaps
your face awake with icy needles.
Kammenoi Ostrow fades to silence.

Where does one make a stand for life?
There is nothing north of you,
and little cause to bird-flee southward.
This is the edge of the world.
This is where the first snow falls.

Subjects: Edinboro, Kammenoi Ostrow, autumn poems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC8ah61cMNw