The Daemon Leads Me On

by Brett Rutherford

Greece, when thy fleet-footed Hermes graced
my adolescence with the poet’s tongue,
when eyes conceived of impossible art
and the sightless, deaf and immutable
logic of words first sprung to my grasp;
even when music burst upon me —
in all that beauteous conception
no word or chord attained this pitch
where now I lie.

Earth, now that your dew-time’s herald larks
have urged the hesitant spring of the sun,
I wake to hold one, new to my arms
as our restless and irrefutable
tokens of lips, caresses and sighs
carry us over the cavernous edge
of frozen sea.

Thanos, when thy hungry gravebed takes
my poems, and this human eye
grows black with dreaming and weeping
     for art,
and a carpet of green and spurious twigs
drains my old cells in bloodless symmetry,
will this love be coin enough for the boatman?
will whom I loved suffice to keep my name
and poems read?

Hermes has been my guide.
I know nothing of grace or immortality.
The god of sudden inspiration
is my daemon, and I must pay him
by being buffeted this way, that way,
one step ahead of the landlord,
at odds with order and decency until I am 
of words bereft.

(This trifle existed in an almost inarticulate version in my 1973 book, The Pumpkined Heart. It makes a little more sense in this version.)

Regaining the Muse

I wrote the original of this poem after spending almost two years writing novels (a terrible mistake, in retrospect, even though they were published). The original, called "Avoiding the Muse," was rather irregular in its metrics. In preparing the new edition of "Poems from Providence," I took a deep breath, and the Muse said, "Look, the least you could do here, if you can't give me a sonnet, is to re-do this in blank verse." I submitted, the poem got a little longer, and I think it more worthy of its subject now. A little rhymed couplet popped up in the middle, unplanned, as if in a nod to that mode. The poem as it stands, rude as it is, expresses my gratitude that the Muse did not abandon me.

REGAINING THE MUSE

Silent this voice for more than a year now —

homeward I come again with head bowed down,

weighted with other laurels and their debts,

back to poetry and its finer lyre.

Time and this book alone shall tell if I

am any wiser than I was before,

or if the Muse whose hardened gaze I dodged

shall reconcile herself once more to me,

come to the window I deck as of old

with that dim flame that She and no other

can see. Heartbeat pentameters return,

furrows I plow anew; bones, rock & root

I move away, to plant a newer crop:

trees that will rise to the bellies of clouds,

roots tapped in the strata of dinosaurs,

leaf sprouts that will themselves contain whole books.

From one thought, many lines; from but one dream,

a vision framed at the heart of epic;

from sap of imagination, the sword

of heroes and the gods who inspire them

to plant a Troy, a Rome, an Asgard bright,

as hope against the all-devouring night.

Shield-maiden of Bard, Skald and Poet,

Muse, take me back! Have I not given up

everything to make these lines? Look at me,

Muse: the fading wraith I am, you made me.