Interrogation

      Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, vii, 470

Q.

Tell the stern one on the bench above,
he who hath no eyes but hears all,
what name you call yourself, and who
and of what place your father.

 A.
I tremble before thee, judge of all!

 Q.
Speak freely. He is but one of many.
Few they are, who meet the owner
of this forbidding and barren place.

 A.
Well, then, I was — and am — Philaulus.
Eucratides, my father, from Kos —
if he my father was — who knows?

 Q.
A cautious and a wise reply! What
livelihood took up the bulk of years?

 A.
These hands have never pulled
a plough, nor grappled the ropes
that hold a sail aloft. Instead
I tried to be wise among the wise —
a teacher, that is to say.

Q.
Full-haired your head,
well-trimmed, your beard.
A full count have you
of fingers and toes. How, then,
did you depart from life?
Did old age creep up upon you,
or some sudden sickness, or fall? 

A.
From what the sages taught me,
I mixed the Cean potion of death.
Of my free will I enter Hades.
The boatman’s coins I had,
and suitable prayers, I hope,
preceded me.

 Q.
                      So, were you old?

 A.
Ah, very old. All whom I loved
with the fire in my body, are gone,
and my world had gone to grayness.
All that I had to teach — subsumed
it was in newer sciences. It was time.

 Q. Wise the law that permitted this.
Wise is he who places no burden
of care on those around him.
Until a certain time,
     you must wait here,
till that of earth
     that still weighs down
the soul, passes. Worthy the life
you led in line
     with wisdom and reason.
Welcome, brother, to Hades!

 

 

 

The Dark One

by Brett Rutherford

In memory of Scott Forsgren

We laughed in the graveyard
I wrote into poems and he
traced out in pen-and-ink.
His fingers raked earth
in the lake-shore hillside
until a bone that might have been
Jeannette Culberton’s finger
came to light, his trophy.

He walked one summer night
across the college campus
not knowing anyone, migraine
vision colliding with my identical
pain and misery. Two weeks
he stayed; like brothers we shared
a chaste bond, not to be broken.
I could not go home to parents;
something had riven him likewise
from home and family. Wagner
and Schubert, Mahler and Bach
bonded us. Moonlight and lake
and the transcendent stars
were our true homeland.
Some friendships
are instant, and last forever.

I moved to New York. I heard
he was swept away by religion,
at least for a while, and then
I heard no more of him.

Decades later, at a college reunion
for those of the Woodstock years
I heard it said casually
that he had drowned himself,
rock-weighted, self-hurled
from the top of a bridge.

In mind’s eye I saw
his weighted jacket,
the too-deep water,
the ignominy of a found body,
the pointless inquest,
the baffled, pained, guilty faces
of the left-behind.

I left the reception,
closed tight the door
of the cinder-block dorm
and wept uncontrollably.
That half-an-hour’s grief
should be enough for anyone,
but it did not abate.

What was the use of his 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?

What would I not have given to save him?
Why is self-murder a crime against the living?

If only magic could bring him back,
I would sit with ring and book
until the world collapsed
into its core of iron,
until the loam of the soil parted
and his dark laughter exploded
from his unremembered grave!

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

If my hand raked soil
to touch the tip
of his dead fingers,
it would be our first
and only caress.

Too Much Philosophy

by Brett Rutherford

     from Callimachus, Epigram 25

“Oh Sun, farewell!” the suicide
cried as he jumped off
the highest wall of the city.
So died Cleombrotus
and he went straight to Hades.

Nothing whatever
had gone wrong in his life.
His doting parents
were full of grief, and cursed
the evil star Catastrophe.

All this because he read
one book of Plato.

 

 

The Empty Tureen

 

by Brett Rutherford

     In memory of François Vatel (1631 – 24 April 1671)

 To die for the gods,
for one's planet,
for a nation, even,
is honorable

 and we invent Valhallas
where the worthy great
feast endlessly with
poets and composers
all around them.

 To will one’s own death
over dishonor
seems quaint,
and even ridiculous
when psychopaths
caught, just whirl and turn,
accusing their accusers.

 Vatel, the great chef
of the great Condé,
a better man
than his better,
fled the banquet,
hid in his room,
fell on his sword
over a spoiled dinner.

 No one had come by horse,
galloping to Chantilly
as ordered, no one came
with the one ingredient
intended to delight
Louis Quatorze —

 the moment had come
and gone, when one tureen
could be tipped, one course
converted from bland
to sublime. It tipped;
the waiter’s face turned white
when nothing came;

the tureen was empty,
as all down the line
of two thousand dukes,
barons, widows and mistresses,
each silver vessel
was tipped
and came up likewise
void as a cenotaph —

 and so, in the apartment
above, the great chef
impaled himself and died
for want of lobster sauce.