Life Without Siegfried

     Thoughts many years ago while hearing Georg Solti
     and The Chicago Symphony perform Act III
     Of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in concert

1
Here walks young Siegfried by the Rhine,
armed with a Ring the old gods lost,
curled in a fist, that ancient gold,
its sun-gut power crushed to grams
of portable might.
This hero, half-awake,
does not yet know himself.
He has lived among bears and evil dwarfs.
He knows not what power means,
nor in his brazen youth believes
the Rheingold curse’s warning.
As the nixies taunt him, he almost hurls
the thing into the river — let them have it;
it’s neither good for food or fighting —
but he yields instead, self-irked
to danger’s lure — his strong arms
enjoy a good battle. He savors fear
as though the its loss would soften him.
He will keep the Ring, to see what happens.

Already you are drugged, young man:
the Tarnhelm poison pours mercury
across your eyes, blinds you to envy
and to those who tread along behind you.
You love the hunt, the running ardent life;
sun-gilded trinkets are nothing to you
since you eat from the nut-trees and hunt-fire.
You are proud of your strength, your certitude 
oblivious to oaths of greed and lust,
the lure of pleasure the ends with knife-thrust.

As music soars, some listeners both hear
and see. Others have obsidian, dead eyes,
inverted smiles frozen in Republican hauteur,
Mrs. and Mr. Gibichung in furs and wingtips.
She has done nothing to harm anyone.
He has perhaps done a great deal to a great many.
The thin and tender line between cynic 
and murderer: one says no heroes live;
the others makes sure all heroes are killed.

This opera is not for its audience. It dwells
in a realm of ideas, forms crystallized
in words sung, spun upon leitmotivs
that make all words much more than their sum. 
Siegfried, you do not know
you are being played through, lived through,
a thousands voyeurs and auditors engaged
in your triumph and love and loss.

At the last, pathetic youth,
when your eyes are cleansed by a traitorous cup, 
when you at last remember everything,
you see how Love and Art are yours,
how you were tricked into giving them away
to fools; the Love you awakened
sent to warm the glutton crowds,
Brunnhilde cast to Mrs and Mr Gibichung,
never to grace your own barren hearth.


Then at the surge, when wings of worth
flap with your just demand,
you are just as suddenly slain.
Your terminus erupts in raven wings
and the All-Father who could have saved you
does nothing. One funeral beat
will serve for all. Everything must fall.

2
Now proud Brunnhilde,

the spiteful demi-goddess, comes,
armed with her timeless grace.
Whom have you killed? she asks
He brought the sun to your side,
you heard his songs, took me,
his freely given gift, in vain.
Come, light the pyre, indeed!
Burn all the souls in whom the hero died,
see if the withering youth in your breast
falls too, like his, when the world
envelops darkness for an age.
His loss has cost you me:
I’ll be no muse for coward bards.
All art and song I strip from you.
Birds even shall be dumb.
Life without Siegfried
must teach you what you have lost.

There burns the maiden Art:
museums blaze, books fall
as leaves, a flaming trumpet
melts, and in the wake
no hearth on earth shall glow again.

The floods of time and folly
bear off the Ring, while gods
who thought themselves undying
turn to dust in an eye-blink.
Now humankind will worship
a wimp’s god, a bloody thorn,
a bleating lamb, a sigil.

Go to the forest black, go where
no church steeple blights horizon.
Stand there, and on a breeze you hear
Brunnhilde’s hymn
changelessly re-sung:
to have lived, or died,
in the love of the human best
is great, and answerless.

[Revised May 2019]

Wotan Meets Siegfried

by Brett Rutherford

You, Wanderer,
     graybeard and granite-skinned,
          obdurate in wind, leaning
          upon an ancient staff:
what storm
brews now inside
those stony silences?

You loved
     a woman once, a son
     sprung from her easily —
     through him, a son again.
Is that the boy,
     now climbing the crag
     to goat heights,
     his golden locks
     a laugh
     at your receding gray?
Who are you,
     anyway, the stripling asks,
     under that hat?
     Why is its brim so wide,
     why does it droop
     across your face like that?
You answer
     uneasily, It is the way
     of travelers to bend
     a hat against the wind.
He spies
     your missing eye,
     your need to defend
     a sightless side.
     Somebody else whose way
     you blocked, no doubt
     he plucked that eye out?

Taunting,
     the young man edges
     to pass,

     barred by
     your swifter arm,
     your staff of ash.

You know him now:
     Siegfried, son of Sigmund.
     You say: The eye I lost
     is one of the ones you use
     to see the one I have left.

He is not much for riddles.
Lunging, he breaks your staff.

He pushes you aside
like an inconvenient boulder.


You have nothing to tell him
he cares to hear about.
Like father, like son:
even with ravens to help,
you never saw anything coming, either.
Entropy scorns the immortal.

[Revised May 2019]