Twenty-Year New Yorker, After His Exile

by Brett Rutherford

Though I thought I had shed it,
this city has grown on me,
my head-top
soaring amid the
clouds, fingers
outstretched
toward the harbor goddess.

I am all of it —
luster and greed,
poet and dreamer —
landlords unnamed in tinsel-gold
lording it over the Lorca slums —
infant stock brokers
in twin baby prams,
their nanny pushing past
doorways where tattooed
squatter punks rage — the towers
and their polished atriums
clean and classic for an Age of Silver —

cameras watch everything, as bulky men
in blue uniforms eye multiples screens
for back-packed likely suspects, yet eyes
avert from the darkened outer avenues
whose concrete canyons smoke
with suppressed resentment.

I can be all and celebrate all,
make my inkwell of the
things you dare not think of:
the crumbling infraworld
of steam pipes that, bursting,
cook office workers like
lobsters, the rivets and spikes
that loosen beneath the wheels
of the subway, the furtive shadow
that gives itself in doorways
to random takers.

This is Atlantis, Babel, Gomorrah and Tyre,
The Temple of Dendur, Tyrannosaur,
Ming, Ch’ing and Tang ceramic
Carnegie Hall, the Opera, the Symphony,
the thunder-thump of 1812 in the Park.
The nights of undulating ecstasy
sparking still in a hundred thousand eyes
in the city that will not sleep
and will not surrender its secret yearnings,
the pagan embrace of gods in underwear
towering over neon flesh amphitheatre,
Times Square unsquaring America
into Dionysian dervish naked dancing.

I am the weed-lot strewn with mattress springs,
the chaste fountains of Lincoln Center,
the pride of the library lions on Fifth Avenue.
Long-legged Athena strides here in the sunlight —
behind her, a meth Medusa beckoning.
Forward or backward? Where will this city go?
Where its inhabitants?
Jack hammers and dynamite
remake my countenance,
revise my profile.
I am always fleeing this city to save my soul.
I am always coming back
to make it anew in marble.

          —

Revised 2026

The Stranger's Tombstone

by Brett Rutherford

     After Theocritus

I did not live out my days.
Too young I died, among Greeks
who scorned my Syracusan accent.
Subsisted, I, and borrowed not:
small point of pride for a man,
but I did not return in triumph
to an arbor’d rest, and a grave
with native soil around me.
Here, even the gnawing worms
avoid my humble shroud and say
to one another, “A foreigner!”

That Far South

by Brett Rutherford

A friend writes
that he is moving to Chile
to get away from
you know, everything.

Chile, really? I know
of pine forests
on the Pacific coast,
the last refuge perhaps

for those who yearn
for fjords and streams,
but what of the winds
that tear through
Tierra del Fuego,

unending hurricane
so fierce that trees
grow only in one direction,
flat to the ground;

what of the Mapuche
Indians, untamed
and yearning still
to expel the gringos?

And who knows what
those Santiago
oligarchs are up to
and for whom they'll come
when they get around to you
and your invading kind.

Chile, I think not,
not while the Andes,
razor-sharp, pierce clouds
that scream in agony,
not, and worst of all,

not where, because
so far below
Equator's line
(just check a globe)

everything
is
upside
down!

So This Is Exile

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     After Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871”

 

V

The narrow path is not an easy one.
Ah! Just try it for a while. It takes
a special daring to prove the crowd wrong,
to be upright in one’s own soul
     and stay that way,
to guard the universal sense of right
when all around you trample and bruise it.

When one who tries this is declared “outlaw,”
the outlaw is rewarded with as much
of this thing called exile that the law allows.
You do not exile just anyone you please.
Not house-arrest and not imprisonment,
this punishment is inexpressible,
a terrible and almost holy thing.

 

How many will come and stare
at the front door of your remembered home?
How many, from afar, will squint and scan
the eaves of your old roof, and ask, “Where is he?”
Will there even be an acceptable
reply, that is not a lie, or an evasion?
Imagine him in some desert place, alone,
or crowded in where every step is watched
and no one is allowed to say his name?
What’s on his mind, in a place
where his native tongue is seldom spoken?
The flower he picked with a childish hand?
A dark street corner that one furtive glance
imbued with a spell that would never quite fade?
Old times and lessons learned in school?
Old dawns, fields that were greener then
with far more sonorous birds?
A certain blend of sky and cloud
that curtained one place, and no other?
To learn, by hear-say only
of those who died in his absence,
their bedside unattended, tombs
he would never see as moss
and vines erase familiar names.
This is exile.

 

Exile is a water-torture, infamous,
a timid executioner’s delight,
pangs to the heart
as granite of duty,
rings with the falling drops
and erodes away.

 

Exile is a compound-interest penalty
inflicted on the innocent and just,
so under Tarquin, or Augustus Caesar,
or Bonaparte, condemned men die
because they are innocent and just.

 

Exile, a place of shadow and longing,
is a dimly-seen mist, an expanding silence
made up of stolen glimpses,
     snatches of song and bird-call,
a dark wood glimpsed, a reef
that is there one day and gone the next,
     a breath, a sourceless sound,
all closing in upon a pensive brow.
Oh!  Tell him his homeland still exists!
(This being true is the most terrible fact of all.)

 

By an invisible thread our homeland holds us,
     the one thing which, once lost,
retains its charm for us forever.
The fields of one place only
     seem to belong to us,
its trees not shaped like any others,
     its riverbanks, its lowering sky —
this place alone brings back our steps.

 

Homeless, we shall forever wander,
and if some foreign king should banish us,
     we slough it off,
for banishment is not an exile.

Exile is a form of death,
     taken in slices of clock and calendar,
some letters unsent,
     and many more undelivered.
Alive at his desk with pen in hand,
his words must issue forth so fast
the censors cannot catch and cancel them.

Each exile, unique and solitary,
is given a chance for immortal glory.
As for the kings and tyrants,
full half or more of them are dust,
names scarcely recalled
in the cavalcade of idiots.

Go Into Exile, or Remain and Suffer?

Many Russian poets and writers fled into exile to get away from Lenin and Stalin. Most Russian exiles were miserable and depressed. Many Russian writers and poets who remained were imprisoned, or murdered. Anna Akhmatova remained, and her brave lyric poems are Russian icons now. Here is my translation/adaptation of her poem about the choice of fleeing or remaining. Food for thought as some of us think of leaving the United Snakes.

ANNA AKHMATOVA: I'M LIKE A RIVER

Adapted from the Russian by Brett Rutherford

I'm like a river
this heartless epoch turned
from its accustomed bed.
Strayed from its shores
this changeling life of mine
runs off into a channel.

What sights I've missed,
absent at curtain time,
nor there when the house lights dim.
A legion of friends
I never chanced to meet.
Native of only one abode —
city I could sleepwalk
and never lose my way —
my tears preventing eyes
from seeing the dreamt-of
skylines of foreigners!

And all the poems I never wrote
stalk me, a secret chorus
accusing me, biding the day
they'll strangle me.
Beginnings I know,
and endings too,
and living death,
and that which I'll not,
if you please, recall.

Now there's a woman
who's assumed my place;
usurping my name, she leaves
me only diminutives to end
my poems with: I'll do the best I know with them.

Even the grave appointed me
is not my own.
Yet if I could escape my life,
looking straight back at what I am,
I should at last be envious.

Subjects: Russian poetry, Akhmatova, translations, exile.