Into the Ashen Night

 

by Brett Rutherford

I know we said we’d never —

but for a moment today

we passed a foot apart

on the angry pavement,

sun in your eyes,

the snow in mine.

The edges of our shadows touched,

an overlap of gray penumbras.

Late slant of sun upon my desk,

the lamp turned on, beam-glance

from the glass framed portrait

I have not brought myself

to hide away or burn —

too many shadows! I want to write.

My shadow dips down to page

with its own pen.

I hesitate.

It gets there first,

mocks my writing

with almost invisible ink,

my fountain-pen aslant

with most peculiar penmanship

in a nearly-forgotten tongue:

Ne sors pas dans la nuit cendrée,

sous l'ombre de la lune —

évite ce lieu hanté

où un fantôme ressuscité

chante pour lui-même!

Dans son sang-froid,

la rouille rouge

et une corrosion noire

coulent.

Son œil cyclopéen

aspire tout sur lui-même,

son iris

un abîme d'onyx...

Oh, the horrors that the heart withholds!

* * *

Translation:

O go not forth into the ashen night,

beneath the shadow of the moon —

avoid that haunted place

where a risen ghost sings to itself!

In its cold blood, red rust

and black corruption flow.

Its Cyclopean eye

draws all into itself,

its iris an abyss of onyx...

— Revised 2026. Originally titled, “Contact.”

Her Little Apples

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Paulus Silentarius, The Greek Anthology, vi, 290

She sent him home with two apples,
rosy red. Her mother watched
but missed their secret gaze as eyes
outlined the apples, hand to hand.

What wizardry she worked,
ensorcelling desire so that,
alone, his hands trace ’round
and ’round the apples’ edges,
eyes closed, the curve of her —

Make Merry Now

 by Brett Rutherford 

     Adapted from Rufinus, The Greek Anthology, v, 12

Let’s get it on, Prodike.
Here at the bath, whose water
is neither hot nor cold, and flesh
is the fire that burns, let’s crown
our heads with daring laurels,
and with a vintage undiluted
take in the grape as fast
as the poems pearl out
     from our laughing mouths.

Large cups, large draughts,
no matter who is looking
or wants to join us, more,
and always more to come!

Oh, do not remind me
the days are growing shorter,
how night’s long shadows
foretell the reaping. No!

Short is the time allotted us.
I shall be old, and you
a horror to look upon.
Shall we both live to see this,
and bitter at the last,
raise up our cups to Hades?

 

 

Separated

 by Brett Rutherford

     from Li Yu, Poem 30

No one will say
why I am not allowed
to see you. Spring broke
the day our hands last touched,
and now the Spring
is half the way to Summer.

Everything I loved
in your presence
annoys me now.
Plum blossoms fall
and pile in drifts,
blow in my face
as I brush them aside.
They are no longer
beautiful to me.

A stupid swan has come
and perched itself
on my window-sill.
What does she means
to tell me? What language
does a swan speak,
anyway? And where has it been?
Can it carry a dream to me
of you and our time together?

Here we came, a pair of exiles,
and now, from one another
exiled again, and to what end?

Remember the games we played,
the contests among the poets?
Now, if one came up and asked me,
“What is the sorrow of parting like?”

I know how to answer: 

It is the one thing
both eternal and infinite.
The sorrow of parting
is like new grass in spring;
the farther you look,
the more there seems to be.

The Beloved Speaks ("The Assignation")

 by Brett Rutherford

    after Li Yü, poem 20

The flowers were bright
     (and might have lit my way like lanterns)
but the moon was diffused in light mist.
Cool, but not too cold,
that was the best night to go to my lover.
Trembling I trod the perfumed stones,
step upon step amid the night-blooms.
I held in one hand the golden-threaded shoes,
in the other his scroll of urgent summoning.

South of the newly-painted hall,
in the appointed place I met him.
His face was turned away and upward
as though he searched the moon's face,
or with his hawk-fierce eye, some dove
asleep on a still and leafy branchlet.

At first, I leaned against him, shivering;
my pale arms could not encompass
the sweep of his cloaked broad shoulders.
He made a sound that might have been
my name, or merely sighed, exhaling.
I said, “I cannot come as often now,
so tonight you must love me twice as hard.” 

Nocturne

by Brett Rutherford

Wordless, he came.

No knock, no bell,

no warning phone call.

The door just opened,

and there he stood.

Weary he was

from long traveling.

A backpack, overstuffed,

dropped to the floor.

As I said, "Welcome!

So many years!

Sit down for tea!"

he sat.

And tea was made, 

bread torn

by two strong hands,

fruit, yogurt, nuts,

whatever in hand

that required no stove

at three in the morning.

Not much was said.

He had been somewhere

you would not want to go,

and this is where he fled.

"Go back to sleep," he said.

He lay beside me, damp

with the storm he had walked in;

he smelled of ashes, lilac,

apples, and wild cherry.

Asleep, he wept.

He was half over me,

shuddering.

I tasted tears

and the cold rain

still rilled from off

the fringe of blond hair

that covered my face.

He jolted awake.

"I dreamt," he told me,

"and in my dream

I was with you,

and weeping.

And now I wake

and find myself here!"

I traced with one hand

upon his cheek,

the salt line of tears.

His hand stopped me,

covering mine,

as each of us made sure

the other was not

some phantom.

"Oh, stay!" I cried.

"Wake not somewhere

above and beyond

this moment!"

Wordless, he came.

The door just opened.

His backpack, overstuffed,

still sat in the kitchen.

He stayed — he stays.

He is here for keeps, he says.

no matter how many

years ago he died.

Swear Not Your Love

 by Brett Rutherford

     from Callimachus, Epigram 27

 The gods are too smart,
and much too occupied,
to listen to lovers’ promises.

A good thing, since Calignotus swore
to love her better than any woman.
He swore, and now she’s gone,
while he walks out and about
on the arm of a wealthy boyfriend.

 And as for poor Ionis, the girl,
gone like a gnat at dusk,
or pining in some temple’s cloister,
of her they shrug and say,
“Who knows?” This time next year
her name will be erased for good,
a smudge on love’s calendar.

 

Those Little Love-Notes

 by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Callimachus, Epigram 43

By name, you accuse me,
and so, by name, Archinus,
I answer you:

if I left little poems
here and there for you to find,
I was decent about it.
Neither your name, nor that
of your family were impugned
by my obscure utterings.

If in my right mind
I serenaded you,
ten thousand blushes
befall both of us,

but as it was,
I came unwilling,
as wine and the love-god
forced me, one pulling me
from out my bed, the other
made me not ashamed
to stand there,
a gossip’s mockery.

Feebly, I sang;
trembling, I wrote.
If anyone listened,
they did not hear
for whom Callimachus
yearned. Once more
I scratched papyrus,
once more I waste
a lyric, it seems.

I kissed the doorpost.
I vanished just as
the moon rose up.
If this was wrong,
then so be it. I am
outed, and you,
you could do worse, you know.

 

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?

November Desolation

by Brett Rutherford

My heart is a cenotaph.
My undelivered love notes
go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
where a drab  clerk files them indifferently
in the room where the wilted roses go.

 Why? Because I finally burned your portrait,
consigning frame and glass to the dumpster,
ripping to shreds the returned letter
that had come back four years ago, stamped
Addressee Unknown, not forwarded.

 If I do not think of you before my
sleeping, perhaps you will now shun my dreams.
Go! Forget that you came to me one night
with everything you owned in a suitcase,
and how you stayed, no questions asked, until
my music dispelled your inner darkness,
and how you explained, “I slept-walk, I guess,”
when I once woke to find you beside me.

 Go! Go! and if you circle back again,
I am not so sure I will remember you.
I am getting on, you know, and such rooms
as are full of cobwebs and dried-up lusts
are less appealing now. My cancel stamp
has learned the use of Return to Sender.