Things Abandoned to Hermes

 by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Julianus, Prefect of Egypt, The Greek Anthology, vi, 28

Sparing the fish from
     this day forward,
I, Baeto, old and trembling,
leave everything to Hermes —
the rods, the oar, the hooks,
a weighted net as large
     as any man could handle,
the floats, the well-worn creels,
even the dark stone, fire’s mother
from which I brought that element
to warm cold nights ashore.

I am done with the sea, done
altogether, so here,
to make an end to sear-faring,
I bequeath you my anchor,
the one true thing that kept
my unstable craft in place.

The Shards of Gods

by Brett Rutherford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 NOTE:

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

 

 

The Daemon Leads Me On

by Brett Rutherford

Greece, when thy fleet-footed Hermes graced
my adolescence with the poet’s tongue,
when eyes conceived of impossible art
and the sightless, deaf and immutable
logic of words first sprung to my grasp;
even when music burst upon me —
in all that beauteous conception
no word or chord attained this pitch
where now I lie.

Earth, now that your dew-time’s herald larks
have urged the hesitant spring of the sun,
I wake to hold one, new to my arms
as our restless and irrefutable
tokens of lips, caresses and sighs
carry us over the cavernous edge
of frozen sea.

Thanos, when thy hungry gravebed takes
my poems, and this human eye
grows black with dreaming and weeping
     for art,
and a carpet of green and spurious twigs
drains my old cells in bloodless symmetry,
will this love be coin enough for the boatman?
will whom I loved suffice to keep my name
and poems read?

Hermes has been my guide.
I know nothing of grace or immortality.
The god of sudden inspiration
is my daemon, and I must pay him
by being buffeted this way, that way,
one step ahead of the landlord,
at odds with order and decency until I am 
of words bereft.

(This trifle existed in an almost inarticulate version in my 1973 book, The Pumpkined Heart. It makes a little more sense in this version.)