The Secret Tree

I am dry. A circle of bark
peels stiffly from my crumbling limbs.
The itch of mold and termites
gives me no rest from entropy.
Leaves have not come this year.
It is rough everywhere:
parched earth has matted straw for hair
and desperate creatures huddle, homeless.
What the hot wind implies, I follow:
push out my roots to where the rains have gone,
deep, deeper, search for new rhythms
in crack and crevice, beyond the worm-world.

Dead to the wind above, bare-boned and tall,
I weave no banner poems in air, no seeds
fly out that other green may imitate:
making another like me is not the answer.
Mine is a secret growth, a sunless tree,
a new thing never seen before.
I plummet toward earth’s mantle,
sprout from the roofs of caves,
make roost for the lightless chatterers,
the bats, my only friends in this sightless
and nearly soundless chasm.
Through the bottom and beyond, I grow.
Above, my seeming corpse, that monument,
betrays no life to deadly air. The dead things
around me are truly dead. I sway
in secret winds of magma, magnetic,
I drink salt waters from the hearts of geodes.
I bloom in the dark heart of everything,
that place, not Hades, but equally dreaded,
to which everything wants to, but cannot
fall. I have more branches now
than I ever could have imagined.

Squid sing to me in the ocean trenches,
plates moan tectonic as I wrap new rings
of iron and nickel around myself.
If leaf and blossom come to me now,
who shall see them? No one.
If seeds, or something like them,
issue from my branch-ends, where
will they go? Volcano-vented upward?
Or hoarded here in darkness?
The tree above seems only a dream now,
but so long as no one cuts it
and no storm dares to topple it,
I am only its bad dream. Pray
I do not awaken.

Not A Hymn to Venus

Among my suppressed poems from the 1970s, I found a draft of this poem, which was inspired by my reading of the crackpot book, "Worlds in Collision," by Immanuel Velikovsky, who claimed that Venus and Mars had a near collision within human memory before Venus settled into its current orbit. Velikovsky claimed that the Biblical Flood occurred because of this planetary catastrophe. Under the bizarre spell of this book I encountered Lucretius's great scientific poem, De Rerum Naturum ("The Way Things Are," or "Concerning the Nature of Things,") which begins with a hymn to Venus the goddess. I never published the poem, as any reader would assume that I subscribed to Velikovsky's theories, even though it was more a whimsical piece asking "How would you address the goddess/planet if it really had done us that much harm?"

This revision includes an epigraphic opening verse that recounts the Velikovksy ideas so that the poem pretty much self-explicates, and then the mock-hymn commences. I think it's fun now, and I am happy to welcome this poem into my garden of little monsters and blasphemies. Lord knows, Venus has never done me any favors, anyway.



I. EPIGRAPH
Unfair to Luna to call mad Velikovsky a lunatic,
so let us call him merely a madman. In Worlds
In Collision this self-taught astronomer declared fair Venus
a cosmic interloper, whose gravity-war with Mars
and brush with Earth produced the Biblical Great Flood
and a race memory of planetary dread. Nonsense
of course, but argued with passion and the paste-pot
of history and art, psycho- and anthro- pology:
Planets as billiard balls; humans remembering
the cataclysm as a universal shriek of “Ia!”.
Under its spell, I rewrote the hymn of old Lucretius
who commenced The Way Things Are with Aphrodite-praise.

II.
Not to you, o shining ascendant world,
morning and evening the brightest of all
in the cold night sky, not to you, Venus,
do I bring my praise and supplication.
I know from what dark nebula you came,
an apple of discord sent hurtling on
by One resenting our sweet yellow sun.
I know that man’s love is not your care
for does not loveless marriage fill the earth
with more than enough starving progeny?
Young men befooled, and maidens, may worship
and make offerings at your temple door,
while in the sad garden out back, old maids
sit in a line for whoever takes them,
the last and least bargain you offer them
before they’re only fit for winding sheets.
Seen from far off, so close to horizon,
your distance blinds us to your jagged teeth
which once unskinned the rock-strewn globe and sent
men howling back into ancestral caves;
nor can we see your fiery white tresses
which once ripped through our virgin atmosphere,
your poison breath of naphtha upon us,
oceans ripped into a tidal tumult,
a watery death that spared no lovers.
Your palpitations were not welcome then,
fair Venus, and even less welcome now.
Mars kicked you sunward; Earth lay in ruins
from just one passing toss of your girdle.

Meanwhile, we humans have outgrown panic.
Outward we look to the far suns, the blackness
nearly infinite between the galaxies.
We yearn to find our place of origin,
the place from which the oldest life blew down
athwart the wind between worlds, as we yearn
to endlessly invent new poems and songs,
vast fugues and operas and symphonies,
inwardly big as the outwardly vast.
We no longer backward-looking, blinded
no more by the sun we orbit, are winged.
That we yet live, upon a bleeding earth,
and dream such wide-eyed dreams, I do rejoice.
And you, Cytherean Venus — stay put!

Epitaph

Rest here
    the still-born poems that sputtered and died
Rest here
    the prose, amphibious, grasping for land
Rest here
    the vague allusions, thrice explained
Rest here
    the early draft abandoned, orphan child
Rest here
    the art-pride wounded, neatly healed
Flown from here
    the finished poems — not here but risen
        to a better life.

Once A Poet

He has the haunted look
of one bereft of Muses.
The trees conceal from him
their secret names;
the messenger ravens
no longer light
upon his lintel;
his curtains are drawn
against the pale white hands
that formerly beckoned
his insomniac scribbling.

Soundlessly and dreamless
he passes his nights.
The ink inside
his favorite pen
dry as Pompeian ash,
no longer yearns
to bleed itself
into a living poem.

The old journal
sits in a box
in an antique cabinet,
untouched as a mummy
in an undiscovered tomb.

How did he come to this?
Did he seek his Muse
in women,
bequeathing her gifts
to his children,
to his students,
or did he lose her
among the lawyers
and governing boards
that so consume
his hours?

“I used to leap
from peak to peak
like Shelley,”
he tells me.
But now he looks
before he leaps —
backwards and downwards,
calculating the risks,
the possible collisions
with other dreamers,
the futility of it all,
the caution of a muskrat
at water’s edge.

Shall I tell him the secret,
that everywhere he walks,
his Muse is waiting —
in the mica that glints
from his granite buildings,
in the shadowed space
beneath the dowager skirts
of the weeping beech,
in the unknown book
opened at random
for inspiration?
Or that she waits,
a scarf tied tight, a book
(the same book always
open to the same page,
where he left off),
unnoticed on a wooden bench
in sight of his office.

He has only to sit
with a blank sheet before him
and to call her name.

“Tell him,” she told me,
as I passed out of our meeting.
“I will,” I promised.

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.