To the Arc of the Sublime (Anniversarius 27)

In nights beneath the stars,
    sometimes alone — sometimes
    with one I loved
         (in futile or secret urgency) —
I have outwaited
    the rise and fall of Scorpio,
         arc of its tail
              stinging the treetops.
I have traced the inconstant moon,
    the indecisive Venus;
    feel more assured
by the long, slow haul of Jupiter,
the patient tread of Pluto
    (whom they pursue
         in their frigid outer orbits
I cannot guess)

Such solitude,
    millennia between
         the fly-bys of comets,
perhaps is why
    they need so many moons,
why rings of ice
    encircle them like loyal cats.
It is lonely in space,
    far out
where the sun is merely
    a star among stars.

It is lonely in autumn.
    I sit in midnight woods.
A trio of raccoons, foraging,
    come up to me,
black mask eyes of the young ones
interrogating the first cold night,
    the unaccustomed noisiness
         of bone-rattle maple leaf
              beneath their paws.

How can I tell them
    these trees will soon be skeletons,
    the pond as hard as glass,
    the nut and berry harvest over?
These two are young —
    they would not believe me.
Their mother rears up protectively,
    smells me,    scents out
    the panic among the saplings,
    the smell of rust and tannin.

We share a long stillness,
    a moment when consciousness 
    is not a passive agency.
Our sight invades the countryside,
    embracing everything —
    sleepers in beds in a concrete tower-
    earthworms entwining in humus rot —
goes up and out through the limpid sky,
    streaming past moon —
         — moon’s lava’d seas —
out, out, to the arc of the sublime,
    tracing the edge of great Antares,
leaping to other galaxies unafraid.


(Let space expand as though the worlds
    still feared their neighbors!
Let miser stars implode,
    their dwarf hearts shriveling
         to cores of iron!)
We are the scourge of entropy.
    We sing the one great note
         through which new being
              comes out of nothingness.

Does it have meaning,
    this seed-shagged planet
        alive with eyes?
Is earth the crucible,
    sandbox of angry gods,
or is it the eye of all eyes,
    ear of all ears,
the nerve through which the universe
    acquires self-knowledge?

But these are weighty thoughts 
    for man and mammal!
We are but blood and minerals,
    upright for an instant,
    conscious for but a moment,
    a grainfall of cosmic hourglass.
Yet I am not ephemeral:
    I freeze time,
         relive moments
              chronicle the centuries
    re-speak Shakespeare,
         beat out the staves of Mozart,
              read the same books
              my forebears knew
         make of old words
              my wordy pyramid.


I am the one
    snapping the pictures of solar systems,
    sending myself
         an outside-in self-portrait.
I send my name and signature
    on bottles spinning past Uranus.
I am the one who asks, Is it worth it?
I who hear the X-ray wind reply, It is!
I am the one who would not stay in caves,
    I was discontent in the treetops.
I wanted to be bird and whale and rocket.

Ever, o ever more mortal now —
     — friends falling away like withered leaves —
still I find joy in this subliminal shrine of autumn.
My hand is full of fossil shells
    picked up from the lake shore rubble,
scallops enduring with the same rock faith
    (implicit minimum vocabulary):
I live, and the increase of my consciousness
    is the span of my life.


 — February 19, 1991, Providence, RI

Let Winter Come (Anniversarius VII)

I have been here a quarter century —
now let me rest! let my contrary self
be silent this once — this year
no fancy from my leafy quill.
The lake will still eat leaves without my lines;
the unacknowledged cold drops to the bone
from dawn of equinox whether or not
some gloomy choral anthem welcomes it.

Hear me, friend: I will not send you dead trees,
the frost no longer colors me orange.

I dodge the four winds’ summonings, evade
the draft of winter’s war, refuse this time
to slurry down autumn with napalm frost.

Although I turn the page, my pen is dry.
Whole forms no spring can disinter
scream past me into shallow graves —
leaf-flake will go to vein and then to dust,
love that once sprung from vernal lust dies off
to tumble-leaf gravid forgetfulness.
With summer gone, the past is verdigris;
broken-off promises to peeling rust;
to the boneyard with your false embraces,
to kettle-pot sky, your terrified flight —

Leave me then; I shall be silent as frost,
sliding down autumnless to sudden snow,
ghostless too on whisper-still All Souls’ Eve,
droop-walking sans pumpkins and tilted corn,
thanks-hymnless on harvest feast day, chiding
the moon to tick in slug-down count to twelfth-
month solstice and a muffled caroling.

Let winter come, if it must. I grow old
in these leaves, like an old mattress this ground
has humored me. The muffled maple-leaf
carpet accepts my tread without addressing me.

The Muse of the acorn is baffled by silence.
Ye Maple Giants, what is there to sing?
I walk by their houses; those whom I love
fold into the shadows with their lovers.
I window-watch until the blinkout freezes me.

Why do the hanging bats look down at me
that way? Why do the squirrels pause just
long enough when I see them, eye-contact
asking me why I have nothing to say?

Why, leaves, do you windlessly follow me,
clinging to my shoes and to trouser cuffs,
skittering across the bridge before me,
laughing at my failed romance, shivering
me into this my single bed and book?

Poor leaf in my pale hand, do you wonder
why in this gloom I will not write of you?
I press you to my cheek, cool, damp, and red.
You know me too well, my only friend now,
you know at the end I will not scorn to love you
though I protest my loneliness tonight.
The tree that bore you knows I will seek it,
that I will come to lean against its trunk,
waiting for dawn in the lake-edge snowing.

Bereft of leafage and loved ones, we’ll watch
as lying Venus casts her pall on ice.
Why write a song that none will ever sing,
or poems that make their object
    run for the horizon?

Leave me, autumn! Silence, ye wanton winds!
Abandon, birds, these wrinkled, wretched trees!
Here are the pen, the ink, and the paper,
   the empty virgin expanse, pale yellow —
   the ruled lines pulling me down like magnets —
No! no! I have nothing at all to say —
and I will not, will not write this poem.


 — 1972, New York; revised 1983,1995, 2019

The Pumpkined Heart (Anniversarius III)

Somewhere, the moon is red and cornstalks lean
with the wind in plucked fields. Not in New York,
city of bleached stone and desperate trees,
is my long walk of haystacks, fog in ascent,
not where traffic sings its sexless honking
can anyone mark the dim-out of frogs,
the dying-off of dragonfly wingbeats.

I am pulled up — I levitate, October-tugged,
away from the rat-doomed isle of Hudson,
clearing the water tanks and steeple-tops,
held fast on course by Orion’s glimmer,
the angry scorpion tail fast behind me.
With leaves and dust I fly to my lake shore,
to the pumpkined heart, the base and the root,
the earth I touch as pole and battery.

I love this village, though it loves not me;
remember it, though it erases me.
I mark in my life, how I bear and remember 
Octobers, and I know that a year is judged
by how it dies in these treetops: if it is burned
to cloud the eyes of men, or if it lies, burst
red in its full regale, waiting for snow,
         and the worms
and the spring, yes, to feed a new sun!

Earth, I am an ochre sheet of your leaves,
leaves more frequent than men in my lines,
leaves more fertile than mothers can be, leaves,
red, yellow, ambitious, how you have crept!
Leaves who have chilled my undraped lovers at night,
leaves sharing graveyard solemn caress with my lips,

leaves recurring everywhere to say their red gossip,
leaves for all I know returning again to this Fall,
    to this place, still blushing to recount
    how lovers were spent in their bed,
    leaves forever spelling the name of lost love!

You names that rise to my lips on October nights,
     you sleep-thieving echoes of aspirant heart,
     rise from the sealed tomb of years, drag shroud,
     where no leaves chatter nor branches impede
     dead, in the track of stalking remembrance — you
     who wake me alone in my grave, grave bed to recall
          each passionate urge from green twig.

Each, each and all have grown red, 
     defiant in the drugged fall,
denying parentage in terrible wind, 
     nonetheless breaking free,
falling to my fever in your high flame,  
     red, then wet,
moist in your somber dissent, then dry, then dead,
then in my hand the brown dust     
     that a seed should come to,
a leaf forever spelling the name of lost love!

Revised 9/6/2019.

Autumn Elegy

This is the very first of my Anniversarius poem-cycle, a long arc of writing centered around autumn. It was written at Edinboro Lake, Pennsylvania, many, many, many years ago.

AUTUMN ELEGY

by Brett Rutherford

The snow has come. The swirling flakes self-immolate
on hot maple grove, white-fringe the aging auburn oaks,
a coin drop from winter into the glacial lake.
(Cold comes so early here — September frost invades
the harvesting and gives the roses heart attacks.)
The boreal wind has taken up residence,
has seized the calendar in icy clench. The hat
I haven't seen since spring comes down —I undertake
a day-long search for hibernating gloves and boots.
My scarf has stolen off — I know not where. The mouse,
the gray one my cat keeps catching and letting go,
darts to and fro on the kitchen floor — does he know
the hard light's reckoning? Does bone-deep chill at dawn
embolden him this once for daylight foraging?
(We have an arrangement on the winter's supplies:
he comes out at night and he and I know full well
that whatever is not locked is not wanted, fair game
for a gray mouse.) He nudges a cast-off crust,
noses for crumbs, his whiskers italicizing
the advent of hunger, his tail a question mark
interrogating me about the wayward sun.
Alone in frost, I take my place at the lake,
my solitude complete, my steps the first to break
the pathway to the pebbled shore. I stand alone,
until the rabbit peers out from the graveyard grass —
twice now he's been there among the mummied lilies,
his eye, as mine, upon the never placid waves.
The summer boats are gone. White ducks that waded here
are huddled now beneath the bridge, far downstream.
The other birds have packed their bags — they have left us
their broken shells, their desolated nests, their songs
a carbon copy of a twice-repeated tale.
Lord Lepus, what do you know of impending ice?
Do you suspect the cirrus-borne snow's arrival?
Will you find greens enough beneath the snow bank?
We turn our mutual ways — you to your warren
amid the husks and roots and toppled gravestones —
I must go to book and breakfast. I leave the trees,
fond frame of my eye's delight, putting behind me
the cup of lake that always welcomes each sunrise.
Soon now its eye will be blinded, a cataract
reflecting sheet-white nothingness. I walk through town,
across the college grounds where last night's wind's caprice
made here a pristine bed of snow — yet over there
an untouched riot of maple on still-green lawn.
The carillon tolls the beginning of the day;
the students hurry, dumbfounded at virgin snow.
I am the only one to linger here. I stand
upon a carpet of red, soft, ancient leaves: some,
some are green yet, they are still proud,
they are fallen on the wings of their youth
and they are going to pick up anytime now
and fly back —
I am mourning for them,
for them, for you, for my brothers who have
fallen.

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SUBJECTS: Anniversarius, autumn poems, Edinboro.

Autumn Sundays in Madison Square Park

Stately old sycamores, sentinel oaks,
     fan-leafed gingko and noble elm,
year by year your patient quest for the sun
     has sheltered such madmen, squirrels,
birds, bankers, derelicts and poets
     as needed a plot of peaceful
respite from the making and sale of things.

Poe lingered here in his penniless woe.
     Melville looked up at a whale cloud.
Walt Whitman idled on the open lawn.
     (Sad now, the ground scratched nearly bare,
Fenced off against the depredating dogs;
     the fountains dry, while standing pools
leach up from old, sclerotic water mains.)

Four chimes ring for unattended vespers,
     no one minding the arcane call,
not the bronze orators exhorting us,
     not the rollicking hounds unleashed
in the flea-infested gravel dog-run,
     not the grizzled men in boxes,
so worn from the work of all-day begging

they’re ready to sleep before the sun sets.
     A thousand pigeons clot the trees.
The northwest park is spattered with guano,
     benches unusable, a birds’
Calcutta, a ghetto a bloated squabs
     feasting on mounds of scattered crumbs,
bird-drop stalagmites on every surface!

Daily she comes here, the pigeon-lady,
     drab in her cloth coat and sneakers,
sack full of bread crusts, and millet and rice,
     peanuts and seeds from who-knows-where.
Still she stands, in the midst of offerings,
     until they light upon her shoulder,
touching her fingertips, brushing her cheeks

with their dusty, speckled wings, naming her
     name in their mating-call cooing,
luring her up to lofty parapets,
     rooftop and ledge, nest precipice
where, if she could fly, she would feed their young, 
     guard their dove-bright sky dominion
from hawks, the heedless crowds, the wrecking cranes.

Across one fenced-in lawn the sparrows soar
     in V-formation back and forth,
as though they meant in menacing vectors
     to enforce the no-dog zoning.
Amid the uncut grass the squirrels’ heads
     bob up, vanish, then reappear
as the endless search for nuts and lovers

ascends its autumn apogee. But here
     the squirrels are thin and ragged,
road-kill reanimated harvesters,
     tails curled like flattened question marks
as every other morsel offered them
     is snatched by a beak or talon.
Descending birds make calligraphic curves

as branches twine in spiral chase of sun.
     Nothing is safe from scavenging —
trash barrels tipped for aluminum cans,
     the ground beneath the benches combed
for roach-ends the dealers crush and re-sell
     to law clerks and secretaries.
Even the cast-off cigarettes are taken

by derelicts and nicotinic birds.
     Certain my notes are tracking him,
a storm-tossed schizophrenic darts away.
     Beside the World War’s monument
(ah, naïve time, to conceive no second!)
     an Asian woman gardening
adds green and blossom to the shady ground

amid the place-names of trampled Belgium,
     forest and trench of invaded France.
(Not her war, certainly, not her heroes,
     yet her soft blooms, as from a grave
whisper the names of the now-dead warriors
     and sons who never come to read
of Ypres, Argonne and the barbed-wire lines.)

A welcome bookstall has opened its doors,
     as if to lure the passers-by
to read, to dream, beneath the timeless elms —
     but who can sit, immersed in book,
as suicidal leaves cascade, as hands
     shaking and thin, trade crumpled bills
for bags of bliss in crystal, crack or powder?

Is this the potter’s field of shattered dreams?
     The copper arm of Liberty
once stood at the northern end of the square.
     The trees once soared. Now roots eat salt,
brush against steam pipes and rusted cable,
     cowed by courthouse, statues frowning,
Gothic and Renaissance insurance spires.

Only the branches, forgiving, forgetting,
     redeem this purgatory place.
A Druid stillness draws here at dusktime,
     squirrel and bird and runaway
equally blessed as the hot-ash sunset
     gives way to the neon-lit night,
city unsleeping beneath the unseen stars.

The White Tiger

Each Autumn, I write one or more "seasonal" poems, adding them to an ever-growing cycle called "Anniversarium: The Autumn Poems." This is the 34th in the series. In Chinese art and folklore, the white tiger is a symbol of autumn (white itself is the color of funerals and mourning in China).

ANNIVERSARIUM 34: THE WHITE TIGER

I dreamt — it was no dream! —
for there, on the floor, the melted snow,
the window-lattice broken, night coals
from the brazier scattered everywhere.

I dreamt he was there beside me:
the great white cat, tiger of Siberia,
lord of Manchurian wastelands. He,
my servant comes trembling to tell me,
has taken up residence
at the far end of the north pavilion.

Ah! let him stay! Bring me my sword?
No! my pen and scroll! I must wash
my thoughts with a draught of tea.
Renew the fire. Refill the yi xing
pot with pale white tea leaves.

“He is Death,” my servant tells me.
I shake my head and answer:
“He is Autumn, the world’s Fall,
my autumn, the end of my youth.
Where he treads, frost follows,
his breath the snow that fells the wheat
and makes the maples scream
red murder. Long have I known
he would be our guest one day.”

“Repair the window,” old Chen admonishes.
“We shall light torches to keep him off.”
I see two feline eyes
grow larger in the passageway.
“It is too late. A guest once past the threshold
must be offered food and lodging.
The tiger may come and go as he pleases.”

I point to where the great beast enters.
My servant issues a piercing cry.
Ignoring us, the monster, white
in the whiter moonlight, lies down
on the warm tiles of the coal hearth.
“You see, old Chen, how he reclines.
I do not think he means to harm me.”

Chen bows and backs to the doorway,
and as he closes the double door, calls back,
“Tomorrow brings terror to the countryside.
The tiger will kill the fallow deer,
and, should you venture forth by daylight,
he, pretending not to know you,
will turn on you as well. An old poet
is sweet fruit after a venison banquet.”

’Twixt Venus and Jupiter, one moon
hangs crescent; ’twixt sleep and dawn
the great beast cradles me, and I, him;
sword, fang, and claw forgotten, defying
our double death; a frozen interval,
two hearts abeat, and four lungs breathing.
I dream of being a great beast, rampant;
the tiger dreams of the calligraphy brush,
the tail-flick ink flow that places songs
on paper, words in the ears
of unborn readers and listeners.

I taste the blood in his mouth, the flex
of great legs that can overleap all prey;
he tastes pale tea and delicate sauces,
the savor of rare wine in a heated bowl.

As dawn breaks through,
the Heaven-tree, the willow boughs,
the distant pines sigh, shiver, shrug:
they will fight for a green day,
bird-harboring, leaf-tipped
to the lambent sunbeams.

Somewhere, out there, the tiger
drags Fall behind him as he hunts
life down with a panther frenzy.
Great clouds of birds assemble and flee
before him; cave, den, and warren
pull in their denizens for the long sleep
of winter. He leaves a trail
of antlered skeletons, doe-widows,
trees clawed clean of summer.

My place is here with lamp and teapot.
I wrote a poem. I rolled and sealed
the rice-paper scroll, wiped clean
the brush and closed the ink-jar.
This is not just any autumn’s beast.
There is some cause for which
he spared me, and was not my Autumn
or the death-breath of my winter.
No, he is the Tiger of Entropy:
he drags tornados, kill-winds
and glaciers behind him.
He would blink out
the world’s great cities if he could;
he would strike down the moon
as his ball-of-string plaything,
leave earth an orphan
in a sunless cosmos.
If I let him.

Tomorrow, while he sleeps,
wherever he sleeps —
and I see the place,
in the shade of the pines
beyond the placid river —
I shall send Chen for my finest mount,
my armor and my banner men.

I shall ride forth,
my flag the three-no poem of summer
defiance: No to death,
No to surrender, No to the idea
that all things must have their autumn.

I have sixty-one years
as I leave the pavilion.
I have fifty-one years as I cross
the great wheat fields.
I have forty-one years
as I track the red-maple forest.
I have thirty-one years
as I ford the river,
horse-neck and saddle
just barely above the water.
I have twenty-one years
as Chen passes me
the great halberd
of my ancestors.

Now, I shall kill the White Tiger.