Despised

by Brett Rutherford

I sit,
a solitary diner
in a Chelsea Chinese
restaurant.

The loud-
mouthed manager
kitchen-bellows
to anyone who hears:

“Two men come in together,
no service for them.
I know what they’re up to,
don’t want their kind in here.
Who wants to touch a plate
they’ve eaten from?
I have to wear gloves
just to use the subway.”

I eat no more. I pay;
I leave no tip.
If I spoke up, I’d only learn
how much kung fu they know,
or how adept they are
with those heavy-handled
cleavers. Some day
my withering contempt
will find its way to the page.

Outside, it is dusk.
The after-rain light
makes everyone I pass
especially handsome.

Passing, I smile at one.
He saw me coming.
His eyes bulge out.
The spit he’d saved
for the last three blocks
in need of a target,
flies out toward me.

No one is safe
in this plague-feared city.

The Men on Central Park West, 1969

by Brett Rutherford

Perhaps I look too wild,
too out of the woods,
too much a hippie for them,
the men who every night
fill nearly every bench
on Central Park West.

Walk if you dare, from
Seventy-Second to Eightieth,
Dakota to the Museum,
as hundreds of eyes size
you up and down, and one,

if you are lucky, will nod.
The place is an open secret.
No business strolling there
except for “friends of Dorothy.”

Doormen across
the street ignore us,
while dowagers frown
from the upper windows.

Sometimes, from the Dakota’s
luxury tower,
a grand piano rills
and thunders over us.
Horowitz? Rubinstein?
Who knows? Our strolls
encompass much city lore,
from Rosemary’s Baby’s nursery
to the museum’s dinosaurs.

Once you’ve been seen
and gain a nodding
acquaintance with regulars,
they soon enough confide
what places are safe, or not,
and whom to trust, or not.

Some, eager to please,
go home with almost anyone.
Others, behind
some imaginary monocle,
look down in scorn on all
who are not Apollos, perfect
in form and fashion.

As midnight approaches,
the police sweep by.
The loungers vanish
like bats and crickets.
Trees hum with conspiracy.
Something goes on
amid the bushes,
but I am not sure what.

One of the last,
as he takes up his umbrella,
confides to me:
“We bother no one;
they leave us alone.
You might meet anyone here,
bankers and diplomats,
actors, composers, and poets,
the upper crust on down
to the lowest of the low.
Stonewall may have happened,
but not to us.”

 

At Lincoln Center

by Brett Rutherford

As if she knew it,
lost it and found
it again after
oh how many wars,
so many
obituaries read,

she, a bent old
squint-faced in
recognition
pink-coat woman
leaned dangerously,
picked up
with hand nearly as brittle,
the first brown leaf.

"Got you!"
she seemed to say.
She tucked it away
into her wrinkled
Macy's bag, then

giving the slant sun
a tsk-tsk, she
vanished before
I could blink to be sure
I had really seen her,
bag lady, hag
of the fountain,
nixie
of Lincoln Center's
high notes, horn-calls
and pas de deux.

Book Row

by Brett Rutherford

London had its
Duck Lane, where
witch trial tomes
and bound-up
sermons rotted
unread, amid
the novels of the day.

New York once had
"Book Row" which ran
down Bowery way
from Union Square
to Astor, mostly on
Fourth Avenue. Bums

in the doorways, dust
everywhere, piles
of books on carts,
sidewalks clogged
with the unsold —

Three dozen shops
catered to the
improvident collector,
the impoverished scholar.
On a bad day
you came out sneezing,
found nothing,

On a good day
the unexpected treasure
that would change your life
emerged from behind
some other title, tucked
and forgotten, its price

a pittance. Better
than venery and its venison
outcome was biblio
mania and the small cry
of surprise, the fear
that the clerk would recognize
your steal and up-price it,

the moment you came
into the light again,
that volume clasped tight,
as though you had robbed
a bank, or jousted a knight
to win the book of spells.

O, the things we found
and carried off, those
rainy Saturdays
when Book Row called!

At Tower Records

Photo from Wikimedia

by Brett Rutherford

 It was one of those years
when Manhattan shone
not white with diamonds
but lurid crimson, Masque
of the Red Death, tombs
filling as fast as luxury
apartments. A year

 of averted gazes when
a particular face flashed
eyes you thought you knew
but that deathly pallor,
sunken cheeks, unsteady
gait made you look away,

 that year you read
obituaries first, that year
you could not count
on two hands the friends
you lost. One Sunday,

 lost in my thoughts
at the cutout record bins
of Tower Records
(the classical annex of course),
in quest of Handel operas
no one had sung since
Handel’s own day, or some
obscure Russian symphonist

 I saw a man whom no one saw,
or everyone pretended not
to see. Rail-thin in shabby clothes,
torn sneakers, he hurried
from bin to bin, all bent
on the big boxes: Wagner’s Ring
(Furtwangler and Solti, no less),
one each of all the Verdi greats,
a heap of Sutherland and Sills
in all the bel canto must-haves.

 The albums piled
up to his chin, he tottered,
shambled, and pulled himself
to the counter. A few in line
gave way; others behind
pulled back at the sight
of the tell-tale lesions
upon his neck and arms.

 He paid cash. It was all
he could do to carry
the heap of albums away.
No one spoke. Eyes turned
so as not to watch
as he passed the store’s
long windows, to where
a waiting cab, trunk
open, swallowed up
the opera horde
and its new owner.

 We turned back,
each and all,
to our searches.
I knew too well
what this was about.
He had come into
a little money, his life
insurance cashed in,
most likely, and by god,
he was going to die
owning every damn opera
he had ever wanted.

 He would go out like a diva.

 

Things Done in Cities

by Brett Rutherford

My Hudson-cliff view from Weehawken
does not efface the smear of it,
Manhattan clogged in its own soot,
the river gray-black with sinister flotsam.
The shade of sycamores and elms,
the brace of breeze and lambent sun,
the promise of golden reflections
if we wait for sunset — these things
cannot negate my friend Boria's lament:

"Peaceful from here, a birdflight
removed, a squint of street.
But still, the thought of the prostitutes,
the gaudy porno shops,
the thought of what might touch you
if you walked along Forty-Second Street.
How have we grown so base?"

I need but close my eyes
to remember slick Dimitrios
and his harem of underage
no-names, and how he sold
his brother's son to slavers
under the eyes of the officers.

Where?
On the steps of the Parthenon.
And when?
Just twenty-three times
a hundred years ago.

Weehawken NJ, Oct 2, 1982, rev. 2020

September in Gotham

This is the only poem I have been able to write about 9/11. It is the darkest shadow in my 40-poem Anniversarius cycle.

SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM

This is New York, and fall

     has caught us unawares.

From Palisade bus I view

     the gap-toothed skyline,

a forest whose tallest trees

     are suddenly missing.

In Gotham, they say,

strange breezes from the south

make certain elders remember

downwind from the death camps.

There is talk of stolen watches

from shops beneath the rubble,

the discovery daily

     of severed limbs.

Month’s end, I walk all day

     in midtown,

with shoppers determined

to do something normal,

eat Szechuan lunch, browse

books, consider new software.

Like many others around me,

I pick things up from the counter,

     then put them back —

everyday urges seem so trivial.

There is not one note of music.

People keep stopping

     to stare nervously

     at the Empire State,

     like frightened squirrels

     in the shadow

     of a threatened sequoia.

The sycamores in Bryant Park

beam back the sun,

     an interrupted medley

     of overhanging clouds

     that pause, then part,

     then scud away.

Seedpods of honey locust fall,

curl brown like overdone toast

     on the pavement,

but the delicate leaves remain above,

     still adamant green.

It is not till night,

     till I turn the corner on Lexington

     and spy the dark hunched shell

     of the Gramercy Park Armory,

that I see the leaves of this autumn,

     its feuilles morts,

taped to treetrunks, walls and windows,

     tied to a chain link fence,

     row on row to the end of seeing,

flapping in rainstorm,  tattered, tearing,

soon to be ankle deep in the gutter —

these album-leaves of anguish

burst forth with human colors —

faces brown and pink and salmon,

oak and ash and ebony,

the rainbow of human flesh,

     of eyeflash —

visages still in their conquering twenties,

snapshot in happy moments,

    embracing their brides,

          babies on knees,

license, yearbook, graduation photos,

smiling at beach or barbecue,

ink fading or bleeding now

     in the sky’s abundant tearfall.

In the language we use

for the recovery of wayward pets,

these posters beg the impossible:

IF ANYONE HAS SEEN HER —

     MISSING   —   MISSING

LEFT SHOULDER SCAR —

A DOLPHIN TATTOO —

MISSING     —     MISSING

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—

MISSING   —   MISSING

PLEASE FIND ME

MISSING  —   MISSING

WORLD TRADE CENTER

—September 30, 2001, New York City

Prometheus on Fifth Avenue

This is one of the first poems I wrote on arriving in New York City many years ago. Its early versions were a little imprecise: I think it is sharper and clearer in this revision. St. Patrick's Cathedral was then a soot-covered haven of religiosity, and I loved the gilded paganism of Prometheus as the antithesis to Jesus -- both suffered, but Prometheus suffered for a purpose and requires no sacrifices or groveling on our part. I was quite besotted with Shelley at this point, so the rebellious spirit of "Prometheus Unbound" is here too. I would come back to this story just a few years ago with my longish poem "Prometheus Chained."

One kind of hero draws no veils,
no fainting ladies, hides not
in St. Patrick’s, binds no virgins
to their rosaries,
shuns candles and goes naked
down Fifth Avenue.
Bronze fleshed, he walks
unnoticed, sees the morning
flush of fire on windows half-mile high,
ignored by cold-eyed men,
oblivious girls, the passing eyes in
buses bent on headlines, paperbacks.
At the peak of mob-time, he stops.
He and the sun flash gold together.

Here’s Rockefeller Center.
Above a pagan tree a-lit with lights,
atop an ice rink decked with world-flags
he is astonished to see himself.
One gleaming statue rises, words
in stone to celebrate Prometheus
are carved behind/
Two gaudy spinsters
cross the plaza, way to Mass. One frowns
at the sculpture’s nakedness, its leap
from earth to challenge the heavens.
“I think it’s not heroic at all,
why put that nude and vulgar carving
right over our beautiful Christmas tree?
I mean, if it’s a god, isn’t a god
supposed to suffer?”
“He has always been there, my dear,”
the platinum harpy rejoined,
“That’s Saint Prome-something.
They nailed him good, right onto a rock,
left him for birds in the sun.”
“How dreadful!
Then he died?”

“I think he suffered a very long time.”

“Why, why?”
“Why?”
“Why did he?

What did he do?”
“He died for someone’s
sins, I’m sure. Just like Jesus. I read it all
in The Book of Saints, with the Sisters.
There’s just no other way to be a hero.”

“Saint Prome? Saint Prome? I think it’s
coming back to me now, Matilda.
I think they named an orphan’s home or —”
Running, he
fled the place, flew on a swift wind
to Caucasus, climbed the purple mountain,
stood high on a snowcap, blasted by wind,
greeted the deathless vengeance of Zeus, hurled
himself from cliff to cliff, rose unwounded,
cursed, crying the wrath of the last hero.