Unlucky Number

by Brett Rutherford

Who would have thought
that the unluckiest digit
was the tiny number Two?

Pythagoras said One
was unity or god,
a thing impossible to break
into constituent parts,

whereas the dreaded
number Two spelled out
diversity and struggle,
disorder and strife,
the root of all evil.

The Romans,
respecting always
the wisest Greeks,
were in accord.

Hold up two fingers
or stop your count
of anything at Two,
was like an evil eye,
or spitting at heaven.

Romans began the year
with One, the month of Mars,
then shuddered, cold,
through all of Two,
the month of Pluto,
when every chill wind
seemed to issue from Hades.

On Day Two of Month Two,
the Manes, unquiet shades
of ancestors neither blessed
nor damned, the walkers
at the edge of Hades, blow

up on night winds to haunt
the Roman graveyards,
unearthing bone and urn,
knocking about the little
household gods on the hearth,
engendering migraines
and mis-shapen births.

Walk on that day,
two fingers up on left,
two fingers up on right,
avoiding monuments,
not saying the names
of the departed. Eat
sparingly and take no salt,

pass water in all four
directions, and fail not
to complete each sentence
once begun, lest you lose
your tongue altogether.

At sunset, chant, Dis Manibus,
Dis Manibus, and pray
that no unquiet ghost answers.

Until the next day's dawning,
sleep not as two
entwined with wife or lover:

On the night of the Manes
each one must sleep alone
just as the dead ashes sleep
in their gloomy vaults below.

Necromancy

 by Brett Rutherford

     from Callimachus, Epigram 15

Speak, stone! Does Charidas
rest beneath you?
A groan from the witch,
a deep gong sounding,
and then the deep answering:

“Mortal, if by Charidas
you mean the son
of Arimmas of Cyrene,
I answer as summoned.”

 Charidas, my countryman,
my cousin, may I dare to say?
What of the world down there?
We still alive are craving to know.

 “It’s dark a lot.”
                         — A ghost of few words.

 Is there a way upward
to some blessed isles?

“An old wives’ tale. Forget it.”

And what of Pluto?
     Does he judge?

                             “A fable!”

 Then all is for nothing,
and human striving, undone.
Have you nothing good to say?

 “How we get by down here
is a tale you would not savor,
but if it is good news you wish,
you can buy a whole ox to eat
for a copper penny in Hades.”

 

 

 

Autumn on Pluto: A Tone Poem

We just finished recording my tone poem, "Autumn on Pluto," which conflates the icy and remote planet with Hades, the land of the dead from Greek myth. In this imaginary version of the ninth planet, the god Hades/Pluto and the entire underworld of the human dead live on.

The opening theme is the Plutonian anthem. Next comes the departure of Persephone on her annual trip back to earth, and the sad voice of Hades expressing his regret at her departure (bassoon solo). Next is a portrayal of a vast, dark forest of tangled trees, which are cornelian cherries (the food of the dead), but grown to a Titanic size. The leaves of the trees are black obsidian, with razor-sharp edges. Finally, the Plutonian anthem is restated, but in an icier and colder mode as the dreary realm of the dead prepares for winter.

The piece is in B Minor, with the central section depicting the forest in F-Sharp Minor. It then returns to B Minor for the conclusion.

It is scored for three synthesizer voices, plus four French horns, a bassoon, timpani, and 12 cellos.

This was recorded in a desanctified church in Pittsburgh with members of the Squirrel Hill Symphony conducted by Meng Qiu-Lei.

Play Autumn on Pluto

Pluto Demoted

A poem protesting the move to strip Pluto of its designation as a planet, and a tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto on photographic negatives of star photographs in 1932. There's also a reference to H.P. Lovecraft, who called the as-yet-undetected ninth planet "Yuggoth" in his writings.

No longer a planet, they say!
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth*, Nine
is now a nothing,
a rock among rocks

despite the tug of its companion,

silent and airless Charon,

the loyal circling
of Nix and Erys.**

Now you are a “mini-world,”

an oversize asteroid

tumbling in dustbelt

so dark and distant

our sun is but a blob

of wavering starlight.

World of death and darkness,

methane, monoxide molting

in every orbiting,

shunned by the sun that made you,

must you now be snubbed by man?

How demote a planet

so lustrous in history?

It has its gods! It has its gods!

Can they evict

  the Lord of the Dead

with just a say-so?

What of the millions of souls

whose home was Hades?

What of beautiful Persephone

who shuttles still

   on a high-speed comet

for her six-month residency

as mistress of the underworld?

What of the heroes and philosophers,

the shades of pagan times

who teem those basalt cities

warming the Plutonian night

with odes and songs and serenades?

Are they to be homeless vagabonds,

slowed from their distant heartbeat

to the stillness of absolute zero?

****

At first, it was “Planet X,”

   out there somewhere

   because Neptune wobbled,

   nodded its rings

   toward Death’s domain.

Then a Kansas farm boy

obsessed with the stars

   ground his own mirrors

   built his own telescope

   with car parts and farm equipment.

Hailstones destroyed the farm crops.

   The telescope survived.

The boy sent drawings of Mars

    and Jupiter

to Lowell Observatory —

Come work for us, they said.

He hopped a train, had just enough

   cash for a one-way fare.

And then, in monk-like hermitage

he toiled at Flagstaff,

comparing sky photographs,

hundreds of thousands of stars,

negative over negative to light,

searching for celestial wanderers,

planetoi, asteroids, comets

that moved when everything else

stood still in the cosmos.

Clyde Tombaugh, twenty-four,

surveyed a sky

where fifteen million lights

the brightness of Pluto twinkled

but only one was Pluto.

He found it.

***

They sought him out

in his retirement,

those fellows

from the Smithsonian,

asked for his home-made instrument

for their permanent collection.

“Hell no,” he said,

“I’m still using it.”

***

I would as soon

forget Kansas as Pluto.

Tell Tombaugh’s ghost

his planet is not a planet!

I can see the old man now,

just off the death-barge

he hopped from Charon,

greeting the Lords of Acheron,

that rusted tube of telescope

under his arm,

scouting a mountaintop

for his next observatory.

Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine!

Change at your peril

a thing once named!

Yuggoth is the name assigned to the Ninth planet, before its discovery, in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
* Nix and Erys are two smaller satellites of Pluto.

Autumn on Pluto

Charon has set
     below the Plutonian horizon.
Beneath the dimmer satellites,
     desolate Nix and even dimmer Hydra,[1]
an autumn tree of volcanic glass
     glints like a spiderweb, leaf-cups
 

athirst for lunar light, weak beams
    more doubt than promise,

orbs almost black in total blackness,
real only in those eye-blinks
when they occlude some distant star.

Blue-black obsidian limbs
     cascade to branchlets,
death-willow leaflets serrated and thin,
     not falling (as there is no wind
        here ever) but flung
with crossbow efficiency,
     a flight of tri-lobed arrows
sharper than surgical knives.

The only red of this world’s autumn
     is blood-flow as deer
(the stock and store of Hades)
     collapse in agony,
and silicon roots thrust funnel
    and thirsty filament
to drink from the spreading rust
of severed carotids,
pierced hearts pumping,
antler and bone and hide
a-pile the slaughter-field.

After a few weeks’ wintering,
     the branchlets crackle and split
as red-berry buds form perfect spheres,
Pluto’s cornelian cherries,[2]
untouched, inedible
amid the bone and gemstone clutter
      of dead Arcady.

Not far from Acheron’s turgid flow
(nitrous ice in a methane river),
dread Hades dreams of venison,
afloat in sauce of cornelian cherry.
 

Persephone wipes clean
     his fevered brow, proffers
a bowl of wheat-porridge
     and raisins, the flesh
of olive and apricot. He sighs.
 

She can only make
     what her mother Ceres taught her.
The juice of venison has never
     run down her chin, nor has
she savored the sourest of cherries
drowned in bee-honey.

He must count the days
     till her vernal journey upward,
till he can pluck the victims
from beneath the kill-deer willow,
fill baskets with precious cornel fruit,
then call forth poets and heroes,
     (Hephaestus and Mars as well
     if he’s in a generous spirit)
for a bone-gnaw feast
around the lava pit,
a bard- and-boast orgy
of odes and war-talk.

It goes on for weeks, and
although the words they speak
are apt to freeze between one’s mouth
and the receiving ear,
for the summer-widower Hades,
death is a bowl of cherries.

---

[1] Nix and Hydra were discovered by the Hubble telescope in 2005.

[2] Although consecrated to Apollo, the cornelian cherry tree was believed to be the food of the dead in Hades.