Elegy for Charixenus

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, vii, 468

Not eighty, not sixty, not forty,
not thirty even, fit age
for marrying, not even twenty!
Eighteen, Charixenus, dead!
Dressed in your chlamys
by your own mother, not
off for a prize, not off to a war,
     not off to a wedding day:
instead a woeful gift
     to hungry Hades.

I swear the earth shook,
     the stones groaned
as all his best friends
bore out his body
and all the house wailed.

So grieved were they
     who carried him,
their sobbing shook
the emblazoned bier.

Led by the baffled priests
    his parents chanted
a song of mourning,
a plea for swift passage
to a blessed place.

No one glanced up
as though to see the shame
of the indifferent sky
would drive all mad.

Alas for the mother’s breasts
that suckled in vain,
for the father whose line
might now be extinguished.

Did some old oath
    bring Furies here,
three evil maids
who revel in death?
Or, born of Night
    and Erebus
did Fates foredoom
this unhappy youth?
O Fates implacable,
barren yourselves you spit
to four winds the love
of mother for her first-
    and only-born.

How can the morrow
resemble the yesterday?
Friends, parents,
(and one, an unknown
lover, who pines for him),
their futures canceled.

Who will not hear
this tale and pity
the left-behind?
Grief pulls all down
to a common grave.

 

But He Is Dead!

 by Brett Rutherford

     From Callimachus, Epigram II

When I said, “Heraclitus, my old friend —”
     you interrupted, “But he is dead!”
Then I stood thunderstruck. Of course
     he died so many years ago.
How far from Hallecarnassos
     have his ashes drifted now?

 But when I said his name,
    I heard a Nightingale begin
his shift. The sun had set,
     just as we two so many times
lingered and talked beneath this tree,
     until the day had faded and gone.

 Not the same bird, most certainly,
    but its descendant — O my heart!
O Nightingale, be still!

 

At the Grave of the Suicide

by Brett Rutherford

     For S.F.

O Beauty, O Beauty,
     O Beauty too good for the world,
how you do rob us by your removal!
What was the use of your death
except to those who stand and weep?
Who must, in one life,
fill, and refill the cup of grief,
so early, and so many times?

I come to your stone,
my exhortation useless,
the gifts I gave or would have given
refused or cast back by the grave.
What would I not have given to save you?

If only magic could bring you back,
I would sit here with ring and book
until the world collapsed
     into its core of iron,
until the loam of the soil parted
and your dark laughter exploded
the long-sealed vault below!

If only souls were immortal!
(The heart breaks, wishing it were so,
hoping to force from nature
what it cannot give)

The weighted stone,
the too-deep water,
the ignominy of a found body,
the pointless inquest,
the baffled, pained, guilty faces
of the left-behind.

The poem you earned
is not the one
I wanted to give.

Dead of Prose at 29

by Brett Rutherford

 

In memoriam, Stuart Milstein, January 1977, aet. 29)

1

A flash of light in his skull
and the bulb burned out,
the moth whose wingbeat
blinked in his eyes
has fled, the vacancy
of irises draw cold inside,
down veins into his arms.

He had turned his back on poems.
Fiction he would conquer,
and be a critic, too.
The typewriter hummed,
plots cooled, awaiting
a thrust, a denouement,
a theory to end all theories
that did not come.

The inkwell from which
the poems had come
was dry, a broil of verse
on scraps of notepads.

Five days the Muse came by
and knocked, pacing the hall
in fear and jealousy.
What was he doing?
Who did he think he was,
Dostoyevsky? Proust?


She hid on the stairs
when they broke down the door,
her cry a tiny lament
in their more shrill alarm.

Had he written himself to death?
This mortal coil so easily shed,
just after the tender leaves
of his tender book of poems
had broken the soil,
and withered, unnoticed.

Careless, somehow, of risk,
eschewing cures; a secret smile
at abandoned regimens,

he was a backslid vegetarian
inviting the tusks of herbivores;
and, epileptic,
he put aside his medicine.

He courted Death
in haze of Eden lost.
There had been a woman,
a European dark lady,
and all had not gone well.

Alone in Brooklyn at twenty-nine;
the knock at the door
three times,
   the dreaded Guest,
the flash in his brain,
no time to —

Alone in his book
his poems are glass:
inside, his eyes
stare back at me.

What is one to do
at such catastrophe?

His tiny book,
like all others,
is but an Icarus
in sun-fire.

Who reads? Who notices?
Who wants to meet us
because of the words we weave?

2
I was his publisher.
I carry his book about
like a little tombstone.

He was disconsolate
as we walked in Prospect Park
that no one had noticed
the few review copies
he had cajoled me to mail.

"It doesn't help," I told him.
"America hates poetry." —

 "It doesn't help to be Jewish,"
he told me. Naïve, I answered,
"What does that mean? I envy
your being Jewish." — "How envy?" —
"You know who you are. You know
where your ancestors came from.
The rest of us don't even know
where our grandparents came from.
We are mostly barbarians."

He shook his head. I didn't understand
that even poetry could be consigned
to a ghetto, and in our time.

Poets must be made
of stronger stuff.

It is a life that chooses us,
and we must take it
with all its perils and costs.

The Muse is unforgiving,
and as for Prose,
     well, that will never do.


It's almost enough
to get you killed.

 — Written 1/20/1977, expanded and revised 4/24/2020

At the Wood's Edge: Iroquois Funeral Rite

(A translation into verse of "Okayondoghsera Yondennase:

Oghentonh Karighwateghwenh," from the Iroquois' Ancient Rites of

the Condoling Council: Preliminary Ceremony)

My son, I am surprised to hear your voice

come through the forest to this open place.

You come with troubled mind, through obstacles.

You passed, my son, the grounds where fathers met,

whose hands we all depended on. How then

come you in ease? You tread the paths

our forebears cut, you all but see the smoke

from where they passed their pipes. Can you

be calm when you have wept along the way?

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.

Now let us smoke the clay pipe together.

We know that all around us enemies

each think, “We will not let them meet!”

Here, thorny ways that bar — there, falling trees—

in shadowed glades, the beasts that wait to slay.

Either by these you might have perished,

my son. The sudden floods destroy; dark nights

the vengeful hatchet waits outside the house;

invisible disease is always near.

(Each day our mortal foes are wasting us!)

Great thanks, therefore, that you arrive unhurt.

What great lament if any had died there

along the way, and running words had come,

“Yonder lie bodies, of those who were chiefs!”

We, who come to mourn another, would cry,

“What happened, my son? — Why do you not come?”

In time of peace or peril we do this —

ancestors made the custom, demanding:

Here they must kindle a ritual fire,

here, in the light, at the edge of the woods,

condole with each other in chosen words.

--This poem was published in Sensations Magazine, Spring Summer 2009.