Invocation of the Demons

 by Brett Rutherford

     On the possession of the San Francisco Police
     by Demons, October 31, 1967

     from the poem-cycle, "City Limits",
     a rant composed at age 20

Look into your streets, o city,
look past the pearly teeth of your
          laughing
Hallowed night,
you farms and suburbs with your
          pumpkin ghouls,
look to the neon metropole,
rip off its lustered streets,
     peer deep into the brimstone heart,
     dark unto the twilight of Democracy.

Fly, you borrowed myths, you dawn-age demons —
     cast your broomsticks and your comet’s tail
          over the hazy bay and its bridge,
dance your round on the lonely Chateau d’If,
     (Alcatraz Island hidden in mists),
cast your Carpathian woe on the fog-bound peaks,
bow out the violin’s call to the sulfurous maw,
          the sulfurous light in the park.
Where Moloch awakens, the leaf of eucalyptus
     dries and withers by the green pool,
     the slope of runaways huddled on blankets.

The face of the stars is blurred with the
          enactment of Western demonology:
at play in the night, cascading through the
          Dippered Way,
the phantoms of dread prodigal visions descend.
Ishtar, Thoth, and Baal careening,
Jahweh in his silence mocking the awaiting
          synagogues;
A horned Christ, Pan and Orpheus aroused
     as nuns collapse in ecstasy.

They come, the sky is heavy with them.
     (as if for rain the leaves upturn
     their soft and fertile undersides.)
They have come for the Ship of State,
     The stars of the flag will not contain them.
Here is the bloody Kali with twigs in her hair —
Listen, she is a wind by the Stanyan Gate.
Tonight, as the good white folk sleep oblivious,
as the men of the Mission toss and turn.
as Chinatown nods off, as Fillmore rage-dreams,
the delicate succubae descend on one and all,
   engendering demons from wrath and avarice.

König! König! Astaroth! God’s blood, thou
Bairn o’ Satan, God’s blood down the hairy
Heavens, bring on the streaming millionems
of the demon’s brood, the leaky umbrella
of innocence, the lust of unslakable virgins.
Satan himself! San Francisco summons you!

In nomine Snow White I conjure the evil which is
     whoredom with any dwarf of the mind
In the name of the tongue I conjure the evil
     of the meaningless words that are Death,
     that are dominion for the mindless
over the lands and the slippery limbs of the
               babes —

in the name of the mind I conjure
     the learned professor
     (oh, he has published widely)
     he only says “Nothing means anything,”
and for this, Chaos bows to him.

König! König! Soutek or Set! Aye, men,
There be bristling demons in the park.
          God’s blood, mun, God’s blood.
     Kali embracing Truman Capote!
     Ruby-carved minions! Fu Manchu!
          Lilith riding Rod McKuen!
     Make way for The Eater of the Dead!
     Mary Baker Eddy! Werner von Braun!
City of Night, Berg of Walpurgis, San Francisco!

Riding the hallowed night,
borne on the dark moon,
     I conjure the slaughter god,
the bane of ultimate hippie, the charnel cord
               of America:
in the name of the hand I conjure the evil
               which is Fear
               which is the King of Evil
     Fear of the dark at the top of the world
     Fear of the Other   is   Fear of the Self
     Fear of Touch       is   Fear of Love
                         is
               Fear of the Word

Fear a bond which is one and together a chain
Fear an umbilical mesa where insensitive
               millions perish,

O that the world would dissolve in the touch of  
               two hands,
               that the multicolored children would
               entwine their arms in a round dance,
               that the sweet-limbed boys would shun
                    the games of war
               and love each other in the summer night
               and refuse to ever fight again,
               that Man for an infinite moment would
               dwell in his own house
                    which is Joy

König! König! King who is Fear, Sabaoth!

Vision at Sunrise

by Brett Rutherford

     San Francisco, 1967

Neither majestic nor unexpected
     have the sun and I
risen pale and cast in fog,
     largest to the eye
on rising, dearest when our
     insensate world, cooling,
permits it to set.

Our shadow is lithe, portends what agility
     there is
in having climbed on fiery pillars in the east;
our shadow is long, unclouded, full of promise,
our squat and burning noon-time,
     self- consuming,
is not upon us, and the glint of optimism
cools our advent. Offertory psalms are wafted
gently, lest we rise not, warm not,
lest you and I, sun, make them not see.

We are of self-expending fire, of the same stuff
          and orb —
     It is they who rise and set, they
          of the passions —
we are of one long swell of perpetual inhalation,
we will die only ultimately while they are
          altogether
     dead and resurrected in their starlit
bone heaps.

But you and the star in me are chained,
at the stone ramp we are defiled and painted,
and the feathered witches pluck out
          our hearts
     and offer them up in our own names.

How can the same sun
be beacon of my life,
and altar of my sacrifice? 

—from the poem-cycle City Limits.

Haight Street

by Brett Rutherford

I sat up in the middle of the night, from a dream in which someone (not sure who) was telling me, "You have to revise 'City Limits' and republish it. It was the work that established you as a New York poet."

As you know, I obey my dreams. Indeed, when I arrived in New York City in 1969 as a 22-year-old and went to Emilie Glen's poetry salon to make my debut as a Greenwich Village poet, my portfolio was small indeed. And much of it was the first burst of poems I had written during my 1967 stay in San Francisco where I lived in the Haight Ashbury and wrote for an underground newspaper there.

By the end of October of that year, some city fathers decided they had had enough of the hippies, and I witnessed police officers beating people on the street. The first time I saw this, I was traumatized, and I need not say that my image of America was altered forever. A few weeks later, on Halloween night, I had a featured reading at the I and Thou coffeehouse on Haight Street, and in attendance was my best friend, Tom Fitzpatrick, who was leaving for Vietnam the next morning. We thought we would probably never meet again.

Two things happened that night that can never be forgotten. First, I was heckled in the middle of my reading by Charles Manson. Then, we were all trapped in the coffeehouse for several hours while the police outside were beating and arresting everyone who looked like a hippie.

I fled San Francisco shortly after that. It took two years for me to write a long poem combining the horrors of the events and the horrible irony of saying goodbye to your best friend because he is going off to fight for the country that wants you dead. (The happy outcome of that is that Fitzpatrick is still my friend, and he has visited me in every place I have lived over all these decades.)

The poem, "City Limits," is about 18 pages long, and finishing it in New York, it was my first "masterpiece" in the original sense of the word -- a work that one completes to prove mastery of one's art. Whenever I had featured readings I read it, and I am sure it overwhelmed audiences, even if the long rants within it, half Whitman and half Ginsberg, did not make a lot of sense. It's a windbag of a poem. But it really is how I got noticed in New York.

Today I have done the bidding of the Muses and I have revised it. It will go in my next book. I will share here just one section, where my 20-year-old self witnesses police violence:

2

HAIGHT STREET

I am watching
the long-haired boy and the
     guitarist on the doorstep.
The blue, club-laden police
     approach them.
One cop addresses them. The
     guitarist moves,
moves away into the crowd.

Then out of nowhere a raised arm.
The boy reels back under the club’s arc,
his raised hands locked in polished silver cuffs,
blood, great streams of it flow down his face--
one long uncomprehending fawn-like glance
     of horror buried as the club falls
his temple red and body trembling to the ground,
          the foot of the man
like some triumphant hunter posed, seeks the
               neck,
blood black like oil, dark in the streetlight.

The other bulwark of democracy drives back the
          screaming observers —
four girls are not spared his club.
After a while the hungry van arrives, they
     vanish
blue-black and burning eyes, crazed hunter
     dragging their prey,
they bag him for “resisting arrest.”

I stood witness and watched this happening.
Two hundred years of history collapsed.
My land, my Revolution, my salvador of centuries,
America I believed the only hope alternative,
inheritor of waning Europe’s blood and fears.
Is it come to this--that laughing ghouls
Like gorged priests and scheming despots
molest the least of your brethren for your
     greater glory?

O would there were god, Columbia,
and if that god looked over you,
     how I would pray to it tonight!

Do you think this is a small thing?
“Get over it,” I hear. “You lie,”
another says, “for your own politics.”
I could have touched that blood;
I could have tasted it. I could
have shouted and been beaten, too.