The Periodic Table: Hydrogen

You are the First One.
Once, your unity
was the Only Thing.
A hot blast of protons,
sperm stuff of the cosmos,
jostling your jillion
identical twins, up, down,
in a vibrant scream
of creative urges,
partnering in ions,
H dating H
(no law against it),

H2 self-bonding,
converging in gas clouds,
gobbling stray neutrons,
dreaming of empire
yet eluding all,
stuff of the Ether,
the Bifrost stream
between galaxies,

ball lightning
and balloon flight,
ever at the edge
of an explosion
if oxygen is near,

holding your
secret of secrets dear:
the self-annihilating
self-fusion, the flame
at the heart of stars.

Without you, nothing;
with you, more questions
than ever answers,
light as a whisper,
Hydrogen.

Symphonie Fantastique

This poem answers two questions that came to me from readers. The first was, "Don't you ever write love poems with girls in them?" The second was, "What is your oldest surviving poem?" I started writing some little verses soon after discovering Poe, then, under the guidance of Mrs. Van Kirk, my high school Latin teacher, I composed a few poems in Latin and then translated them into English. One of the Poe-esque poems has survived and is in my "Whippoorwill Road" collection. The other is here.

At age fifteen or so, I was hospitalized for a few days after a nearly-fatal nosebleed. I lost two-and-a-half pints of blood and was declared dead by an intern since I had no pulse while sitting up. After transfusions, I recovered. Sitting in my hospital bed, whose windows faced a cemetery lit up by a steel mill's red glow, I was given a little AM radio, on which I heard the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique for the first time. The radio announcer spelled out the program of this daring 1827 symphony. In the first movement, a young artist falls hopelessly in love, and the music depicts the storm of his passion, and his hopelessness when he isn't noticed. In real life, Berlioz was smitten with Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress who came to Paris to perform in Shakespeare. Of course she played Juliet.

My first "real" poem was written that night: lines written in response to the music and its program. What survives my later editorial destruction is marked as my Opus 16, and only two parts of the five survive. I cast the love affair of the first movement literally, as the starving young student in love with the famous artist. The third movement, when the poet is off in the mountains trying to forget his love, includes imitations of lonely shepherds playing their pipes, interrupted by thunder rolling off the Alpine mountains.

As an "ekphrastic" poem relating impressions of the Berlioz music, I think it conveys that adolescent ardor, so I offer it in response to the challenge question about whether I had any boy-girl love poems that didn't involve witches, goddeses or vampires. I wish that my efforts to describe the "March to the Gallows" and the "Witches' Sabbath" that end the symphony were printable, but they were truly dreadful, consisting of jingling rhymes in very short lines.

[Note since the first posting: I just discovered another revision of this poem that has more details corresponding to the outline of Berlioz' music. Alas, it also includes a grimmer ending to the Pastorale movement, in which our hero decides to go back to Paris and strangle his beloved. Well, that is where Berlioz takes it next, with a March to the Gallows for the hero. The text below is now the expanded, darker version of the poem.]

By the way, I still love the symphony as much as I did then.

So here is young Berlioz, as told by teen-aged Rutherford:

SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE

(After the Symphony by Berlioz)

1

First Movement: Dreams, Passions

I did not plan this passion.

Your voice intruded on my consciousness,

its foreign lilt, its strange inflections,

the way your meter’d tongue dropped pearls

of Shakespeare, Poe and Baudelaire,

the way your eyes implored me

as though it were my destiny

to grapple with some hooded Darkness

to win you for myself.

But what am I?

What is my frail embrace

to beauty such as yours?

All eyes are chained to you.

See how the students crave your neck,

the soldiers admire your slender waist,

the old men yearn for your kisses —

an army would not suffice for you!

I am your unknown conqueror.

I am the one who sends you violets,

a myrtle wreath, a sonnet.

Others impress you with jewelry,

offer to garb you in silk and velvet.

I stood at the fringe of the stage door crowd.

Strong ones pressed in toward you--

oh, the broad-shouldered ones,

the lion’s-mane heroes, the uniforms!

I was the shadow at the edge of gas lamp.

You smiled, touched hands,

absorbing their love like a thirsty plant,

rose blush rising on your ivory cheek.

You never noticed me —

not tonight, nor on all the other nights.

But then my heart rose up

a double timpani of triumph.

You entered your carriage,

one hand enfolding a billet doux

(still in its envelope, unread perhaps),

the other protecting a fragile bouquet —

my violets! my violets! oh god,

tonight you will read my poems,

tonight you will know that I love you!

I walk the streets all night,
chilled by the Seine
on half a dozen crossings.

I pause before the gray cathedral,
look up into the knowing clouds
that hurtle eastward
to the sunrise.

The rosette window is dark,
for all the candles
and their attendant prayers
have guttered out.
This night my angel,
     good or ill,
is absent. I am resigned.

The heavens will do nothing.
My words alone shall win you.

iii

Third Movement: Scene in the Fields

You shepherds, play!

You know not what your fluted night

     does to the haunted.

You wind, rising in harmony,

I think you plowed great ships

     across some sea,

you tasted salt not of tears only.

Look how you grapple

   with the landlocked cedars,

   birch staffs taut as ropes,

   leaf sails tattering.

The trees snap back, you drown

   the frail reed pipes

   and rage with your own voice

   among the mountain pines.

The shepherds flee. Now double thunder
rolls from peak to valley,
a mournful rumbling
of discontent, as though the gods
had lovers just as oblivious
as she to me.

If these vast and terrible beings
can gain no solace, then what of me?

Would I were dead and gone, would that

bare earth and unabating wind

outlived me, sole dwellers

of an everlasting night!

If I were left
to wolf and vulture,
to eagle, crow and carrion —
if only these pages
     (made orchestral by a hand
     unseen that guides my hand!)

remained, spun down
to the valley, the river, the sea.

If one day decades hence,
     this poem falls from an opened book
into your startled view, or,
passing the concert hall
you hear the corresponding melodies
and discern your name in them,

would you recall me then,
     knowing the one who loved you

     left a bleached skull
     on a granite mountain
     a heartbeat petrified
     into a stony silence
     the thunder punctuates?

My solitary end is pointless
     unless its iron-black pole
can draw you to it.
I will live on, and draw new breath;
I will return to you, unwelcome
as my love has been, not loving,
but as the Messenger of Death.
The pale throat I love,    

     I will crush beneath my hands.

YOU CAN HEAR THE SYMPHONY IN FULL HERE:

Hyllus and the Charioteer

Another in my series of poems in the manner of the Greek poet Anakreon. It really takes place in Providence, but that's another story.


Anakreon, to Hyllus:
Last night I followed you, to the foot
of your street, to that Dionysian ruin
where men and youths commingle 'mid
broken columns and pedestals.
I saw you, "virgin” Hyllus
in quadruped surrender
to a popular chariot driver.

I watched and heard it all
from the anonymous shadows:
the brutal, pathetic beauty of it,
the animal moans,
the false starts,
the invoking of gods,
the simultaneous gasps,
the hurried redress of tunic and belt,
the counting out of three small coins,

I almost laughed at how, departing,
you brushed aside my friend Harmodius
with that most wonderful line:
"Only the hand that has held a whip
can ever hold mine!”

Small wonder that I have never possessed you,
slave as I am of scribbling,
more fond of vowels than hard-edged consonants,
my only rod the stylus. How strange
when beauty seeks not its merited worship,
leaving its pedestal for the dust,
kneeling for the promise of certain pain
and its negotiated, small price.

From A Lost Drinking Song, Attributed to Herakles

A revision of something I wrote in 1994 on a north-bound train. I probably tossed it aside since I was still in my anti-rhyme period. It's perfectly OK for a drinking song to rhyme.

Pound the grape, pour the wine.
The lads will serve us,
the maids will twine
our heads with laurels
and leaves from the vine.

Live and love, fight and die!
The gods will give us
a piece of the sky,
a garland of bright stars
to remember us by.

The Dead Rose

He bought her the rose as a joke.
After all, he was gay —
she was the frat boys’ tramp
and they had spent all of a night
joking about the ones they’d had
in common.

He didn’t deliver it:
on a perverse whim
he held the rose an extra day.
By the next morning it was
a limp and withered hagbloom,
the petals pale, the nectar dry,
the dust as from a tomb or trashcan
marring its too perfect face.

Would he nurse the thorn
with the blood of his hand?

Would he wet the leaf
with a tear? Not in this life.

He wrapped his sad sigil of mock love
in gaily-colored paper,
added a card
headed Memento amorae,
told her their “grand affair”
was already over:
hence the dead
instead of the living
red rose,
then left it on her doorstep.

Did she weep at the thought of his laughter?
Did he smile at the thought of her tears?
He really only did this
so he could write a poem.

Years later he would think about his callowness.
Finding the poem, he would
destroy it with a shudder.
An irony, since most of the women he knows,
Gothically inclined,
prefer dead roses to living ones
But way back then,
no fraternity boy ever gave her, or him,
a single rose, alive or dead.

Request for a License to Kill:

So many people are so full of rage, and feel so entitled to it. Here's a merry little rant:

REQUEST FOR A LICENSE TO KILL:
Owners of car alarm that will not stop.
Yappy little dogs, on sight.
Dowagers drenched in rose water
who make me sneeze uncontrollably.
Ash-spewing pretzel vendors.
Young men who smoke cigars in public.
Anyone playing hip hop
bass a-thump in a passing car.
The beggar who told me
“You have stolen wealth
in your pockets!”
(me with fifty cents!)
Anyone with a law degree.
Anyone walking a pit bull
(unless it is biting a lawyer).
The unseen passengers of stretch limos
doing who knows what behind tint-glass.
Mimes and clowns, monkeys and poodles.
Anyone with alarming tattoos.
Anything loud in a baby carriage.
Oh, and add to my list
anyone who asks for a license to kill.

Ivan Grozni

Concentration camp monster John Demianiuk was finally convicted of war crimes in Germany. Here is poem I wrote many years ago when he was first exposed, and was living a comfortable life of retirement in Cleveland.

Ivan Grozni,

Tyrant of the Oprichniks

Little Father to the trembling serfs.

Your murders pale, poor Ivan the Terrible,
beside the deeds of a fat old man —

a pensioned auto worker
front porch grandpa in old Cleveland
a beer and pretzel neighbor
picnics and barbecues
ball games on the radio
nodding to sleep before the television.

He is another Ivan, Ivan Grozni,
Ivan the Terrible

lord of Treblinka
counting the days to his

Social Security check,
his numbered entitlement —

As Ivan he numbered his subjects —
gypsies and Jews and misfits,
counted them by the hundred,
gassed them by the thousand,
bookkeeping entries at every

ten thousand mark,
medal from the Fuhrer
for every tenth
of a million exterminated,
numbers on a golden arch of death

Gold watch retirement gift —
good man on the assembly line,
speedy with wrench and rivet —
how many cars did he finish?

A mere few thousand, maybe,
nothing to match

the nine hundred thousand
he prodded in

through the one-way door.

He understood efficiency.
Their slouching gait
from off the boxcars
not fast enough,

he whipped and prodded,
maimed and mowed down
the laggards and lame ones.

(His fat hands picked out
the defective bolts,
dropped them to bin —
nobody’s business where
they went — )

Tried for his crimes
he rallies his wife and family,
hires an attorney to fight
this case of mistaken identity.

He smiles at the battered old Jews
who say they remember him,
call him the Beast of Treblinka,
waves to the courtroom audience
and says in Hebrew — I am innocent.
I am not Ivan the Terrible.

Yet who are these ghosts
that crowd the air,
clotting the room with accusation?
Who are these legion whisperers,
nine tenths of a million strong
chanting like monks at a Tsar’s interment
singing like bells of monotonous iron
one steeple truth in a landscape of lies:

Ivan .... Ivan .... Ivan Grozni.

Regaining the Muse

With gratitude to the Muse, who has granted me, in the last two months, the greatest burst of new poems and revisions...

Silent this voice for more than a year!
My head now bowed with other laurels,
I am back to poetry and its finer lyre.
Time and this book alone
shall tell if I am stronger now —
or if the shining, word-wise daemon,
whose gaze and beckoning
I shunned and spurned
like the advances of a rasping crone,
shall now return to guide my pen.

Muse! come to the window I deck as of old
with that solitary flame that you alone can see!
Here the paper, here the pale blue lines,
the furrows I plow again with fountain pen;
bones, rock & root the silences
I move away to plant a newer crop:
sonnets to scrape the bellies of clouds,
elegies whose solemn tears
tap roots into the strata of dinosaurs,
lyric sprouts that will contain whole languages.
Beware my harvest, for dragon's teeth
lurk in the words I plant today!

The Muse will take me back.
Have I not given everything
to consecrate myself to her? Like all
who serve poetry I gave my youth,
heedless of age’s hunger and need.
I gave her blood, though she in turn
could never give me bread! Look at me:
the scribbling thing I am,
addict of adverb and adjective,
drunkard of Orphic utterance,
I am what she made me.

An Expectation of Presences

This is a new revision of a poem written in the pioneer graveyard in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, a place where ghosts ought to, but do not, appear.

"To die is far different from what
anyone supposed...and luckier."
-- Walt Whitman

This gravesite, phantomless, does not appease
my walk -- not for myself alone
have I come, but in an expectation
of presences drawn forth like tides
from that alluring moon, to sit
and hear the chattering of ghosts
for the dead must have many songs to sing:
their dire complaints, their unrequited loves,
their broken oaths, their bony fists
clenched in the earth for some unsweet revenge;
their pleas that some neglected deed be done
to free them from a wormy pilgrimage;
their wry requests to know what souls
once famed to them, now call such pits
a hearth. But here’s no tombly talk;
none but a nightbird and a tapping branch
reply to my arcane soliloquy.

My eyes, as keen
for darkness as those of an owl,
spy nothing; my ears, keen
almost to the ultrasonic,
hear nothing but the bird-stir
and the limestone lap of lakebed.
Where are the ghosts?
These peaceful dead, this tranquil town
sleep far too well reposed.
Doubts do not stalk
these penny plots, no killers wring
remorseful hands, not one protesting atheist
is doomed to somnambulist stumbling.
Can it be
that in their simple times
(the whole of the 1800s buried here!)
mere faith
could be a perfect opiate,
that life within a wall of hymns
led to this silent, dreamless death?

Ah, so they die, who believe in Death,
they never rise, who sell their souls
into a cleric's dull paradise;
they never fly, who think their wings
are promises, to be attached
in worlds not one can wake to see.
O fraud of frauds, and no recourse:
no lawyer can sue an evangelist.

Yet in my heart of hearts I wish
for ghosts. For here is the depth
of all possible woe --
to leave nothing behind.
Nothing to strain against stars
from the haunted tips of trees;
nothing to drift like summer heat
and catch a gable's underside;
nothing to gust from cellar doors
or brood with the trunks in the attic;
nothing to serve as a core for leaves
as they fly in autumn deviltry;
no remnant left to walk the town,
no shadow over the bed, no chill
or mystery for the nervous ones--
those living yet
who think they see the dead --
to be lost from the hands of conjurers,
not even a gleam, a shard
of phosphorescent ooze?

Oh, no, if the choice be
God’s heaven or earth-bound ghost,
I'll keep my anchorage to moonlit nights,
take deed to swamps and vacant lots,
turn houses to renounced estates
abandoned to fright's hostelry;
sunbathe on monuments,
dance wild in summer thunderstorms.

Then, I shall wait for the night
when a dreaming poet comes
to my scarcely-legible tombstone,
mad as myself, my laughing heir.
What things I shall whisper
into his modern, doubting, skeptical
ear, as I reach out ...
and take his hand.

Hephaistion and Alexander

Written many years before "Brokeback Mountain," here's my poem about two men in a tent. One of them is Alexander the Great, the other is his boyfriend Hephaistion. These are not sheep herders in Montana: they are soldiers at the dawn before a great battle. Jared Leto (above) played Hephaistion in the 1994 film, but to me he looks more like Jesus than a Greek warrior.


Sleepless Hephaistion
is watching the dawn
steal gold from Alexander's hair —
the dozing god for whom a globe
gave way, high on a rock,
asleep, their tent a sail to catch
the suneast rising.

Soon horns will stir the troops
into another march. All eyes
will be on the Macedonian boy
for his commands. Nations
lay by their futile defense
topple their deities,
Persia and Babylon supine
as women eager for conquering,
Asia and the scented Chin of Flowers,
and many-templed India
waiting for his aegis in temple dance
of preordained surrender.

Empire may steal him again for a day,
a bride may blush at his summoning
to seal another chain to Macedon--¬-
but night will bring him back
(so dreams Hephaistion,
his hand upon unarmoured breast,
his lips upon the unscarred neck,
his eyes awash in godgold curls)

Since jealous gods listen,
he cannot say “I love you”
to the earth’s emperor.
All he can do is whisper
to his own inner listener:
He’ll meld the world into a ball,
repeople it with Hellene rule,
journey it from Atlantean to Eastern Sea--¬
yet all he is
and owns are mine!

Empire enough,
this naked conqueror
my arms enfold to heartdrum pulse.
Reft of the joy of being god,
it is enough
to possess one.

Quand il pleut, il pleut des financiers

(Men in bowler hats descend from the clouds in Magritte’s painting, “Golconde”)

America, awake! Last night Connecticut
suffered a fall of financiers, precipitate
from aerial fleets unseen and traceable
to nowhere on or in the globe.
At dawn a gray cascade
of overcoats and bowler hats
commenced, each agent replete
with tie and unscuffed shoes,
each with a grim and businesslike
demeanor -- a few, with executive
gray sideburns, clasped briefs
full of significant business plans
and letters of unlimited credit.

Only a few insomniacs
witnessed this chute des etrangers,
silent as dew and just as discreet,
without a flutter of parachute,
without a crease in the perfect lawns.
The anti- Newtonian host
walked with deliberate speed
to the waiting commuter trains
from whence they vanished
unnoticed into Wall Street,
courthouse and brokerage,
library and chapel, gone --
gone and never seen again!
Imposters! Who knows what plots
they hatched in their resemblance
to no one at all! Within days the banks
were belching loans; the wives at home
had well-dressed afternoon lovers;
dogs stood confused at whom to heel
or whom to bar from the kitchen door.

The birth rate rose astonishingly,
as featureless babies that refused to cry
swamped the suburban nurseries.

And this was just the start: the cloud
that made them was but a wisp
of a much larger storm, forging
its turgid thunder into an army
of Nobodies, incurable bores
intent on crowding out everyone
who’s read a book or has an opinion.
Their secret handshakes and nods,
the curious little lapel pins
that your eyes can’t focus on,
the sinister stripes on their ties
not corresponding to any known school
or regiment; the half-wink
they seem to use to greet one another,
smirking at others’ exclusion:

these were the symptoms, alien
and alienating. There were more
like them with each passing month.
The “suits,”
as they called themselves, were here to stay.
As for the rest of us, we
were merged and acquired,
outsourced, down-sized,
shown to the door by security,
pension-plundered,
rezoned, foreclosed,
eminent-domained, evicted,
bankrupted and down-debited,
rust belt trailer park shantied –

just as it was planned
in their spreadsheets,
forecast in their Powerpoint
laptop PDA wireless
global master plan.

We were only here
to serve the Nobodies
on their road to acquiring
Absolutely Everything.

Prometheus on Fifth Avenue

This is one of the first poems I wrote on arriving in New York City many years ago. Its early versions were a little imprecise: I think it is sharper and clearer in this revision. St. Patrick's Cathedral was then a soot-covered haven of religiosity, and I loved the gilded paganism of Prometheus as the antithesis to Jesus -- both suffered, but Prometheus suffered for a purpose and requires no sacrifices or groveling on our part. I was quite besotted with Shelley at this point, so the rebellious spirit of "Prometheus Unbound" is here too. I would come back to this story just a few years ago with my longish poem "Prometheus Chained."

One kind of hero draws no veils,
no fainting ladies, hides not
in St. Patrick’s, binds no virgins
to their rosaries,
shuns candles and goes naked
down Fifth Avenue.
Bronze fleshed, he walks
unnoticed, sees the morning
flush of fire on windows half-mile high,
ignored by cold-eyed men,
oblivious girls, the passing eyes in
buses bent on headlines, paperbacks.
At the peak of mob-time, he stops.
He and the sun flash gold together.

Here’s Rockefeller Center.
Above a pagan tree a-lit with lights,
atop an ice rink decked with world-flags
he is astonished to see himself.
One gleaming statue rises, words
in stone to celebrate Prometheus
are carved behind/
Two gaudy spinsters
cross the plaza, way to Mass. One frowns
at the sculpture’s nakedness, its leap
from earth to challenge the heavens.
“I think it’s not heroic at all,
why put that nude and vulgar carving
right over our beautiful Christmas tree?
I mean, if it’s a god, isn’t a god
supposed to suffer?”
“He has always been there, my dear,”
the platinum harpy rejoined,
“That’s Saint Prome-something.
They nailed him good, right onto a rock,
left him for birds in the sun.”
“How dreadful!
Then he died?”

“I think he suffered a very long time.”

“Why, why?”
“Why?”
“Why did he?

What did he do?”
“He died for someone’s
sins, I’m sure. Just like Jesus. I read it all
in The Book of Saints, with the Sisters.
There’s just no other way to be a hero.”

“Saint Prome? Saint Prome? I think it’s
coming back to me now, Matilda.
I think they named an orphan’s home or —”
Running, he
fled the place, flew on a swift wind
to Caucasus, climbed the purple mountain,
stood high on a snowcap, blasted by wind,
greeted the deathless vengeance of Zeus, hurled
himself from cliff to cliff, rose unwounded,
cursed, crying the wrath of the last hero.

Water Music I

You flow. You do not understand.
The spring has eked you out of the earth.
You fell from the storm, you barely coalesced
before the journey began.
A gust of wind from a cloud’s dead eye
blew you onto the clay of the north.
You roll downhill, impelled by gravity,
jostled by roots, inhaling minerals,
fall to a pond, where spawn of frogs
grope in the eye of batrachian sun.
At the end — a hesitant stream.
The grass barely parts in your path.
By noon, you have come to the lake,
your flow anonymous, your voice
a cancellation of wave forms.
You fear you are the plaything of the world,
toy of a god
whose cruelty is your solitude.

You flow, you do not understand.
You cannot feel your strength,
your shoulders against a dam,
your spirit overtopping barriers.
You are insensible of reeds, of rust,
the thrust of fish, the wear of shore,
the notes you leave on agate.

Do you know you are incompressible —
that steel would split
before it would compact you,
that your ice can rend the hull of a ship?
Do you know you are the stuff of comets,
emblazoned by sunlight,
your tail as long as the gap between planets?
Do you know you are going South?
How far you have come you cannot comprehend.
You do not know who awaits you!