The Cenotaph

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Callimachus, Epigram 20

This mausoleum, unoccupied,
waits open-doored for Lycus,
gone on a merchant trip to Aegina.
He, of Naxos, and well-versed
in the seasons, went anyway
when Orion and Arcturus bode ill.
He drowned. Ship sunk,
Lycus inside the rotting hulk
of shattered vessel, now sells
his wares to the canny octopus.
Or worse, his bird-picked visage,
floats eyes-up in a knot of weeds.

Decorum forbids these thoughts
be put on stone, so just
his name above the lintel
must suffice. Wild wind
cascades the oak leaves in,
then out, of the empty tomb.

Step in. Remember him,
and if a soft murmuring
comes up, the breeze
and swaying myrtles amplify,
until a goat-cry issues
from your unwilling throat,

it is a warning to mariners,
of the two Kid-stars
in flickering Capella, whose fall
presages the storms that kill.

 

Some Epigrams and Short Poems

by Brett Rutherford


WHAT’S THE USE?

I am the burr
on the foot of God,
the thorn
on his son's temple,
the thirteenth guest
who was turned away
at the Lord's supper.

I warn of Satan,
Caesar, Judas.
No one ever listens.


THE HUNGER

Life is one thing
that eats another
and continues on.
Every tree wants
to devour the sun;
each blade of grass
wishes to be a razor
deterring all tread;

the appetite of shark,
the vampire lust
of the crouching spider,
the tongue-lick
of advancing mold,

your gourmet dinner —
what life is, is what it wills.




DO NOT EXPLAIN

Defend an epigram? Explain it?
I would as soon expound
a sunrise, or good sex.

The epigram, at least,
outlives the other two,
and clings with hooks
to its intended target.




AT THE SPECKLED EGG

Where two had breakfasted
in splendor, one returns.
"Only one," the host sighs,
as he leads you there,
to that special table, front
facing a blank column,
back to the in-out door
of the restrooms. You know
the rest. A sleepy waiter
looks down on you
as though you had six legs
and intended to infest.

Your order comes last,
as tables for four and six
order and finish in time
for their appointed dayjobs.

The pancakes are cold.
The bacon you ordered
and had the waiter repeat
"Bacon?" "Yes, bacon please,"
is nowhere to be seen.
The iced tea was made
some days ago, and when
you send it back, no offer
of other beverage comes.

You pay, and shuffle off
like the insect you are,
the solitary diner
they hid between
a column and a flushing
toilet. Take care
when you wait on a poet!


KNOWING

Knowledge is always
"knowledge of."

Religion,
concerned with things
that are not
and never were,
is not knowledge.


OUTSIDE IN

We have lived to see
the outer planets,
rings, moons, seas and all;
craters in rich detail, poles
North and South, cracks
into hidden water seas,
bust-outs of frozen gas
into their sparse and fatal
atmospheres.

Oh, but with all those comets
ellipsing in and brushing by,
what if there are eyes
and cameras, convex
antennas and radios
reporting back everything
as they graze near
the warm blue world
with its white blanket
of ominous storm-clouds?

What if the outer planets
look back
and are much displeased?


AMERICAN EDUCATION

Out on the playground
it's cowboys and Indians,
Yanks and Confederates,
soldiers and Viet Cong.
A stick suffices.
"Bang! You're dead!"
is all it takes
to score a point,

the victim obliged
to stage a death,
hand to heart
or belly,
death cry of Aaargh!
or No!
limbs shaking, and then
the stone of rigor mortis.

Back in the classroom,
James raises the stick
and tells the teacher,
"Bang! You're dead!"

No problem. This is
the moment of moments
that Mr. Morrison
has been waiting for.
All in a day's work.

Taking his AR-15
from under the desk,
unlocked and loaded
for just such a threat,
he aims and fires.

One to the head.
Two to the heart —
that's just in case,
you know. James falls.
No Aaargh! or gasp
since the boy's head is gone.
Arms and legs twitch
for lack of instruction.

"Gotcha!" says Mr. Morrison.
"Damn! I love
being a teacher."

EASY WAY OUT

Those who turn to religion
for answers

do not even know
the actual questions.



LATE JULY

It is that time
of year again.
Answer no doorbell.
Turn out your lights
of an early evening.
Park the car elsewhere.

As sure as the bite
of mosquito and gnat,
or the wave
of unwelcome spiders,

a multitude is coming,
car after car, tread
upon tread on the sidewalk;
two buses, even
some will take to reach you.

The menace is green
as seen through peep-hole
or the security cam
and it just keeps on coming
until the first frost
has done its business.

Ring! Ring!
     Do not answer it!
If you forget
and swing the door open,
their anthem rings out,
“Hi there!” and “Gifts we bear!”
“Zucchini from our garden!”



WHAT'S LEFT

Just one dead leaf
from an autumn past,

a single lost arrow
from whom
to who knows where,

a solitary quill
some long-dead porcupine
stuck into a would-be
predator,

an epigram in Greek,
returning an insult
or starting a war,

small things adrift
in the dust of planets.



UNDIAGNOSED

According to the then-prevalent
theories of psychiatry/psychology,
I would have been sent away,

and probably lobotomized
for the protection of society,
before I turned sixteen.

I fooled them
by reading their books first.
Chameleon am I,
master of ink blot
and personality test.

They will never get me,
not like the auntie
who drooled and died
in the state asylum,
or the other, a suicide.

I dwell in my madness,
and not alone --

oh, there are others, others!

WHAT NOT TO SAY

I think I have been
in this bedroom before,

and your cat
knows me.

Cometary Love

by Brett Rutherford

My solitude is astronomical.
One time I loved, I loved a comet-star:
once seen, once held, once even bonded to,
he flew away to some outer orbit.
Long is the wait until he comes again;
chances are good that I’ll be dead before
earthward swings his next perihelion.

But now that Hubble’s eye has caught me up,
I learn that things are more dire than I thought:
I am a comet, too, not rooted to earth,
not anywhere near the warm small orbits
of the inhabited worlds. My folly
was to lock my ice-shagged eyes on someone
just as cold, remote and inarticulate.
We each mistook the sun’s fire as our own
as we grazed by one another, flirting
with borrowed heat and false radiation.

On earth, a double comet was double-doom
to tyrants and to religious zealots;
to us it was a candle-lit romance.
I thought you fled from me; you thought I fled.
Each in our own ellipse we sped away.
Now I am told just what the odds might be
that we might ever come so close again,
or even — just imagine that — collide.

Not for an eternity of orbits
will such a thing occur. In fact, the sun
is on its own death-calendar. In flame
and supernova flash all will be burnt.

Whatever made me think I was a man,
and that I, a poet, a flaming star
could woo and win with words and rapt glances?
Who could, with sonnets, defeat gravity?

The Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction

by Brett Rutherford

Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children

Two giants approach, their masses swollen
with age and pride. One, facing us, will pass
before the other, back turned in scornful
enmity. Rings peep like ears from Saturn
as Jupiter and all his companion
satellites take pride of place and orbit.

Back turned to Saturn-Cronos, his father,
Jupiter calls out in scorn: “You, frozen,
turgid in your ever-colder banishment,
you almost ate me once.” No answer comes.

He turns his eye outward, now, accusingly:
“You swallowed my brothers and sisters.
Have you at long last no guilt for your crimes?”
From icy outer rings a bell-tone stirs;
a moon peeps from behind the old planet,
but Saturn, as ever, utters nothing.

Though all was settled long eons ago,
there is no end to conspiracies:
Saturn has eighty-two satellites still
contesting the Olympian election,
clinging to lies and a tyrant’s coat-tails,
while Jupiter is the acknowledged king
with only seventy-nine companions.

“They love me,” boasts Jupiter, “and I, them,
while you have only courtiers bound by dread.”
Now, squinting at sun with his one red eye,
the king of worlds winces as gravity
ever so slightly tugs him back Saturn-ward

and the sullen, yellow-brown cannibal
shrugs, its face and brow inscrutable, its moons
ice-cracked with slogans braying how Jupiter
was not a proper god and the Olympians
were better locked up in their father’s belly,
a fit prison for ill-born imposters.

Nothing will come of the great conjunction,
for the gods as they are, on their planets
wage an incessant strife. Wait twenty years —
it is the same story told once again.
Avert your gaze from Saturn’s armory,
shun Mars and his war-cry. Venus, for love;
fleet Mercury for gods’ inspiration;
Sun ever-rising with beneficent rays;
Moon, the world’s clock with tidal urgings,
and Earth itself, shelter to demigods
and Muses: abide if not obey them,
and leave to Titans the terrors of war.

  

Being Too Much With the Stars

JOSÉ ASUNCIÓN SILVA (1865-1896)

BEING TOO MUCH WITH THE STARS

     translated by Brett Rutherford

Stars range between
the gloom of obscurity
and sheer immensity,
some like pale wisps
of incense in a vacuum;
nebulae you burn so far
into infinity it frightens me;
that all that reaches earth
is but your light reflected;
suns fallen, gone
into an unknown abyss
shedding an unknown radiance;
constellations – mirages
the magicians once worshiped;
millions of distant planets,
flowers in a fantastic brooch,
clear islands afloat in night,
a sea without end or bottom.

Burning stars, far pensive lights,
dim eyes with wavering pupils —
Burning stars! Why are you silent,
if you live, and why do you shine
if you are already dead?

Estrellas que entre lo sombrío
de lo ignorado y de lo inmenso,
asemejáis en el vacío
jirones pálidos de incienso ;
nebulosas que ardéis tan lejos
en el infinito que aterra,
que sólo alcanzan los reflejos
de vuestra luz hasta la tierra ;
astros que en abismos ignotos
derramáis resplandores vagos,
constelaciones que en remotos
tiempos adoraron los magos ;
millones de mundos lejanos,
flores de fantástico broche,
islas claras en los océanos
sin fin ni fondo de la noche ;
¡ estrellas, luces pensativas!
 ¡Estrellas, pupilas inciertas !
¿Por qué os calláis si estáis vivas,
y por qué alumbráis si estáis muertas ?

Not A Hymn to Venus

Among my suppressed poems from the 1970s, I found a draft of this poem, which was inspired by my reading of the crackpot book, "Worlds in Collision," by Immanuel Velikovsky, who claimed that Venus and Mars had a near collision within human memory before Venus settled into its current orbit. Velikovsky claimed that the Biblical Flood occurred because of this planetary catastrophe. Under the bizarre spell of this book I encountered Lucretius's great scientific poem, De Rerum Naturum ("The Way Things Are," or "Concerning the Nature of Things,") which begins with a hymn to Venus the goddess. I never published the poem, as any reader would assume that I subscribed to Velikovsky's theories, even though it was more a whimsical piece asking "How would you address the goddess/planet if it really had done us that much harm?"

This revision includes an epigraphic opening verse that recounts the Velikovksy ideas so that the poem pretty much self-explicates, and then the mock-hymn commences. I think it's fun now, and I am happy to welcome this poem into my garden of little monsters and blasphemies. Lord knows, Venus has never done me any favors, anyway.



I. EPIGRAPH
Unfair to Luna to call mad Velikovsky a lunatic,
so let us call him merely a madman. In Worlds
In Collision this self-taught astronomer declared fair Venus
a cosmic interloper, whose gravity-war with Mars
and brush with Earth produced the Biblical Great Flood
and a race memory of planetary dread. Nonsense
of course, but argued with passion and the paste-pot
of history and art, psycho- and anthro- pology:
Planets as billiard balls; humans remembering
the cataclysm as a universal shriek of “Ia!”.
Under its spell, I rewrote the hymn of old Lucretius
who commenced The Way Things Are with Aphrodite-praise.

II.
Not to you, o shining ascendant world,
morning and evening the brightest of all
in the cold night sky, not to you, Venus,
do I bring my praise and supplication.
I know from what dark nebula you came,
an apple of discord sent hurtling on
by One resenting our sweet yellow sun.
I know that man’s love is not your care
for does not loveless marriage fill the earth
with more than enough starving progeny?
Young men befooled, and maidens, may worship
and make offerings at your temple door,
while in the sad garden out back, old maids
sit in a line for whoever takes them,
the last and least bargain you offer them
before they’re only fit for winding sheets.
Seen from far off, so close to horizon,
your distance blinds us to your jagged teeth
which once unskinned the rock-strewn globe and sent
men howling back into ancestral caves;
nor can we see your fiery white tresses
which once ripped through our virgin atmosphere,
your poison breath of naphtha upon us,
oceans ripped into a tidal tumult,
a watery death that spared no lovers.
Your palpitations were not welcome then,
fair Venus, and even less welcome now.
Mars kicked you sunward; Earth lay in ruins
from just one passing toss of your girdle.

Meanwhile, we humans have outgrown panic.
Outward we look to the far suns, the blackness
nearly infinite between the galaxies.
We yearn to find our place of origin,
the place from which the oldest life blew down
athwart the wind between worlds, as we yearn
to endlessly invent new poems and songs,
vast fugues and operas and symphonies,
inwardly big as the outwardly vast.
We no longer backward-looking, blinded
no more by the sun we orbit, are winged.
That we yet live, upon a bleeding earth,
and dream such wide-eyed dreams, I do rejoice.
And you, Cytherean Venus — stay put!

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.