With Poe on Morton Street Pier

One gloomy autumn night, I sat with my hand-scribbled poetry journals on Manhattan's Morton Street Pier. I had $4.50 to my name. It turns out that this was the pier where Edgar Allan Poe first landed in his New York adventure, which ended in lodgings nearby in Greenwich Village, and then near-starvation in the Bronx. The poem I wrote has been revised several times. Poets read on the piers on Sundays; at night, lonely men trysted there; you could sit alone, a solitary poet, watching the blinking lights on the Hudson, the night chill rising around you. The river lapped at the pier, and wanted you to hurl yourself in and end it all.

Sunset at the Manhattan piers: gray-black,

the iron-cloaked sky splays vortices of red

into the Hudson’s unreflecting flow.

Blown west and out by a colorless breeze,

the candle of life falls guttering down

into a carmine fringe above oil tanks,

a warehoused cloud of umber afterglow,

hugging the scabrous shore of New Jersey,

a greedy smoker enveloped in soot.

To think that Poe and his consumptive Muse

stood here in April, Eighteen Forty-Four,

his hopes not dashed by a rainy Sunday —

an editor thrice, undone, now derelict,

author of some six and sixty stories,

his fortune four dollars and fifty cents.

Did he envision his ruin, and ours?

Did his Eureka-seeking consciousness

see rotted piers, blackened with creosote?

Did rain and wind wash clean the Hudson’s face,

or was it already an eel-clogged flux

when he came down the shuddering gangplank?

Who greeted him? This feral, arched-back cat,

fish-bone and rat-tail lord of the landing?

Did he foresee the leather’d lonely wraiths

who’d come to the abandoned wharf one day

in a clank-chain unconscious parody

of drugged and dungeon-doomed Fortunato

and his captor and master Montresor?

He gazed through rain and mist at steeple tops,

warehouse and shop and rooming house — to him

our blackened brickwork was El Dorado.

He needed only his ink to conquer

the world of Broadway with his raven quills —

Gotham would pay him, and handsomely, too!

Did the lapping waters deceive him thus —

did no blast of thunder peal to warn him

that this was a place of rot and rancor?

The city shrugs at the absolute tide.

I am here with all my poems. I, too,

have only four dollars and fifty cents

until tomorrow’s tedium pays me

brass coins for passionless hours of typing.

I am entranced as the toxic river

creeps up the concrete quay, inviting me,

a brackish editor hungry for verse,

an opiate and an end to breathing.

Beneath the silted piles, the striped bass spawn,

welfare fish in their unlit tenements.

A burst of neon comes on behind me,

blinks on the gray hull of an anchored ship —

green to red to blue light, flashback of fire

from window glaze, blinking a palindrome

into this teeming, illiterate Styx.

Empire State’s cool spire, clean as a snow-cap,

thrusts up its self-illuminated glory;

southward, there’s Liberty, pistachio

and paranoid in her sleepless sunbeams,

interrogated nightly, not confessing.

It is not too dark to spy one sailboat,

pass by swiftly, lampless, veering westward;

one black-winged gull descending to water,

its quills immersed in the neon mirror.

Now it is dark. Now every shadow here

must warily watch for other shadows

(some come to touch, to be touched, but others —)

I stay until the sea chill shrivels me,

past the endurance of parting lovers,

beyond the feral patience of the cat,

until all life on legs has crept away.

Still, I am not alone. The heavy books

I clasp together, mine and Edgar Poe’s,

form a dissoluble bond between us.

Poe stood here and made a sunset midnight.

Poe cast his raven eyes into this flow

and uttered rhymes and oaths and promises.

One night, the river spurned his suicide.

One night, the river was black with tresses,

red with heart’s blood, pearled with Virginia’s eyes,

taking her under, casting him ashore.

One night, he heard an ululating sob

as the river whispered the secret name

by which its forgetful god shall know him,

his name in glory on the earth’s last day.

[Minor revisions May 3, 2019)

Hart Island

I wrote this poem about Hart Island, New York's "potter's field," a number of years ago, and it appears in my collection, Things Seen in Graveyards. This poignant article today in The New York Times revisits the island to ask what happened to the AIDS victims whose bodies were sent there. Even the dead were shunned and their coffins were piled up while workers were afraid to touch them. I wondered sometimes whether my flight from New York in 1985 was an over-reaction -- a vast majority of friends and acquaintances had died, and this article confirms that, noting that 100,000 died in New York during the peak of the epidemic, making up one quarter of the nation's victims.


Ferry cuts fog

in Long Island Sound,

baleful horn bellowing

a midnight run

unblessed by harbor lights,

unknown to sleeping millions

convicts at the rails,

guards behind them,

dour-faced captain at the helm

a face and a pipe

and a dead-ahead glare,

an empty gaze that asks no questions

offers no advice

A careful mooring,

cables thicker than hanging noose

bind ship to pier;

pilings like pagan columns

bind pier to Hart Island

Convicts shuffle to the end of the dock,

guards behind them with billy clubs

hands tensed at holster.

You fellas better behave now,

the captain mutters,

just do what you're told.

And no funny business, another voice warns,

'cause anything could happen to you here.

The prisoners shiver at moonless expanse

of blackened water,

dead shell of Bronx one way,

bedrooms of Queens the other;

clap their hands,

blow on their fingers

to fight the chill.

Guess you would freeze, one speculates

before you could swim to shore.

Just do what you’re told,

the biggest con admonishes.

I been here before. Do what

you’re told and then it's over.

Eager to earn

the early release,

willing to dig

and lift and carry,

they turn to the foreman.

He points to the tarp

that covers the cargo.

They lift the tiny oblong boxes,

frail as balsa

thin pine confining

the swaddled contents.

What's in these things?

one asks, taking on three

stacked to his chin.

Over there, is all the foreman says,

pointing to mounds

where a silent back hoe

stands sentinel.

These be coffins, the older con explains.

Baby coffins.

They lower the boxes

into the waiting holes,

read the tags attached to them:

Baby Boy Franklin

Carl Hernandez

Unknown Baby Girl, Hispanic.

The adult coffins are heavier,

two men at least to carry each one.

They can joke about these:

Heavy bastard, this Jose.

Carla here, she musta wasted away.

But no one speaks about the babies.

The convicts' eyes grow angry, then sad.

Later the mounds will be toppled,

the soil returned to the holes,

flattened and tamped

with a cursory blessing

by an ecumenical chaplain.

These are the lonely dead,

the snuffout of innocence:

crack babies

AIDS babies

babies dead from drive-by bullets

babies abandoned like unwanted kittens

dumpster children

No wonder this island cries in its sleep.

New York Times on Hart Island

The Day Is Normal in My City

The day is normal in my city.
In the garden, Manuel is working,
and in the nursery, Celia warms
milk and prepares bedtime stories.
The children have not disappeared.

The lady chooses among three gowns.
The gentleman selects a red necktie.
They are going to the concert hall,
and there, in a walled garden,
behind brick-work and iron gates,
the man will clench his hand
(his cigar is not permitted),
while the lady sips her Sauvignon Blanc.

They will hear the Emperor Concerto.
They will listen to a grand Te Deum
with three hundred performers.
Up in the high balcony’s cheap seats
the mothers of the children’s chorus will smile.
Their children have not disappeared.

After the applause dies off,
the well-dressed crowd will flow down
the grand staircase.
The day is normal in my city,
but the unanswered question hangs
like an ominous storm cloud:
You, sir, you, madame! Did you vote for him?
Your children have not disappeared.

*** *** ***

This poem was written first in Spanish. Here is the original:

EL DÍA ES NORMAL EN LA CIUDAD

El día es normal en la ciudad.

Manuel, en el jardín, trabaja,

y Celia, en el cuarto de los niños,

calienta la leche, y ensaya

los cuentos de hadas.

Los niños no han desaparecido.

La ama de casa elige entre tres vestidos.

El esposo escoge una corbata roja.

Van al teatro para escuchar un concierto.

Y allí, en un jardín amurallado

detrás de ladrillos y puertas de hierro,

el señor apretará la mano

(su cigarro no está permitido),

mientras la señora sorbe un Sauvignon Blanc.

Oirán el Concierto “El Emperador.”

Escucharán un Te Deum grande

con trescientos ejecutantes.

Las madres del coro de niños

sonreirán desde el balcón superior.

Sus niños no han desaparecido.

Después que el aplauso se apague,

bien vestidos, la audiencia

fluye por la gran escalera.

El día es normal en la ciudad,

pero la pregunta sin respuesta

se cuelga como una nube de tormenta.

Tú, señor, tú, señora — ¿Votaron por él?

Tus niños no han desaparecido. 

The Girl on the Library Steps

by Brett Rutherford

Out I came from the double-door,

arms full of science-fiction adventures,

squinting to see the steep steps downward,

and there she was, rail-thin and shabby

like me, goggle-eyed spectacles

owling up to the library entrance.

She did not move. I squeezed past

through the street door to the leaf-blown sidewalk.

Only one book you need ever read,

her Pa told her. He slapped the Bible

against his knee, the leather binding

just like the strap he whipped her with.

Exultant I flew through the double door.

I swear it opened without my touching.

They had let me into the open stacks —

I had the principal’s note averring

that I, a lowly third-grader

could read at the 12th-grade level.

Hugged to my chest were Goethe’s Faust,

the dreamt-of Dracula at last,
and a tattered copy of Frankenstein.

And there she stood, on the third step now.

One of her shoes was not like the other.

Your cousin Gracie, she was a reader,

least till she got ideas and run away.

They found her dead, and pregnant.

Nobody here’d go to her funeral.

One book, just one book this time,

a thousand pages of delicious revenge.

Down stairs I almost levitated,

the book already open —

The Count of Monte Cristo. Had I opened

the double-glass door? I think I went

straight through like a house-ghost. Step five

was where I nearly collided with her,

the girl in the home-sewn blue calico dress,

her bare arms a patchwork of bruises.

Your Pa found those comic books

your girl-friends loaned you. He says

they’re the Devil’s work. He burned them.

One winter Saturday, Shakespeare in hand,

I bellow, “Friends, Romans, countrymen!”

from open page to the empty stairwell.

Oh, she was there in December dark,

the same dress, same mis-matched shoes.

Now that I wore glasses, too,

our vision connected in focus.

We were on the seventh step.

She stared at the book in my hand

and trembled. I told her the story

of Julius Caesar, then hurried on.

You want a card, a library card?

Your teacher says you need it?

We’ll not have you there, unsupervised.

There might be Jews and Catholics.

Library card! Next thing you know

you got some card says you’re a Communist!

“Intelligences vast, cool, and unsympathetic” —

I rolled the words on my tongue as I left

the library with The War of the Worlds.

Martians, oh, let the Martians come!

And here, on the uppermost step,

I was nose to nose with the girl again.

I could smell stern soap, and vinegar.

Her blond hair was braided to strangulation.

I held the door open to let her in.
She did not move. She trembled.

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”

I never saw her again.

Visiting Emily Dickinson's House

Seeing Emily's Dickinson's bedroom, preserved as it was at her death, and the dresser where all her poems were found, was an almost overwhelming experience. I was so overcome, I almost fainted. Here is a revision of the poem I wrote about the visit. My first draft had some sentence fragments -- they were OK but I would rather be grammatically correct. I was also reminded of the visit to the Dickinson home by Abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, and this led me to add some imagery about the poems being confined in a dark close place like slaves in a slave-ship -- sudden after-the-fact inspiration. The poem is a little longer, but it also more clear, this and that, here and there, poems versus table versus dresser -- the first draft was looser but did not actually make sense as a description. Some say "First-thought best-thought" but I don't think so. So here it is:

THE DRESSER IN EMILY'S BEDROOM

Right there, feet from the bed she died in,
were the poems, sewn up in tiny fascicle bundles,
unread, not to be read, not to be published,
monoprint chapbooks arranged and re-
arranged to suit intended readers
she was too reticent to address,
ever, except from behind a door, ajar.
They came from there, her writing table
(no bigger than a oiuja board),
from planchette pen to folded leaf
stitched shut and mummy-wrapped,
living and smothering just feet from where
a gasp and pen-dab and a foot-tap
telegraphed them into being.
How many enwrapped, entombed inside
that oblong, moth-proof drawer?
how many survivors of admonition
a poet should never ... a lady does not?

Eighteen hundred tightly-wound mortars
she wryly called her “little hymns,”
huddled like captives in a slave-hold, 
sea-echoes lost in suffocated nautilus,
an unlit library with no borrowers —
how many silent nights did she browse there,
and turn the pages, and close them,
and push the drawer shut?

Emily Dickinson at Amherst,
I in your room as close to fainting
as ever in my adult existence,
at tear-burst, with a strangled cry I dare
not utter. A life, a life’s work,
a soul's compression that one executor
could have tossed away for kindling,
or suppressed for jealousy or malice.
But we have you, Emily, we have you always,
your words in a fascicle of stitched stars.

Necropolis

This was the third section I added to a poem called "The Loved Dead." I just realized that it was too vague, and not really connected to the poem, which were memories about one person. This section was a digression, about a completely different "loved dead" and it needs to stand on its own. It starts with a flashback which needed to go into past tense, and now, I think, the poem makes sense. It is gloomy in a Poe-esque kind of way.

In park walk some years ago, 
I came upon your ancestor’s statue,
a Polish emigré who served with General Washington.
He had your face. The bronze
had weathered little. I stood,
and stood, and could not stop looking.
Not acid rain, nor pigeon insult
had weathered it. I had you yet,
and yet had nothing. A few things 
we touched in common, a bowl,
a red-glass pitcher whose breaking
I dreaded to think of. Not one photo.
Who is alive who ever
     saw us together?
What proof but memory,
     a weave of cell and synapse?

In the hard light
of this winter afternoon,
I am cheerful in graveyard
until I see the name
of one of your countrymen.

Sun sulks behind a sudden cloud
and I reel backwards, stumble-stop.
One day I thought that such as you
and I would live-walk the lanes
of all the earth’s graveyards,
our laughter a leaf-pile
against the too-short days.

What now? Amid these tombs and columns,
sphinxes and obelisks, what is there left
but never-ending mourning?

What is there left
except to live on out
our ever-precious moments
in solitary tread, alone,
in their honor, and in their names?

The loved dead 
who never come again
except in shards and glances,
moment of shuddering grief
and the remembering smile,

by what of you, and why, 
am I haunted?

Swan Lake Variations

1
Turns out there are twelve
alternative endings.
No one will leave Swan Lake
alone in its sound-world,
its gloom trajectory.

The cast: Prince Siegfried:
you know the type.
Irresolute, with the kind
of mother known all too well.
"Just pick one. Any one.
I'll have you married, young man."
Odette, who was once a woman,
now doomed to swanhood
in a white tutu.
Rothbart the sorcerer,
in dusty owl-gear, his gig
to turn women to waterfowl.
His daughter, Odille,
black swan seducer.

How many endings
with climactic storm,
forest confusion,
deaths and drownings?

The Prince beats Rothbart
and tears a wing off,
stealing his swan-girl away.
She'll be a human bride
by the time they get to Mother.

Or, the Prince shoots Rothbart
with his magic crossbow.
Odette forgives him
for cheating with Odille
just hours before.
It's a comedy of manners.

Or, sometimes Odette does drown
(hard work for a water-bird),
and Siegfried joins her.
Each clambers up in turn
to precipice and leaps.

Or, Soviets wanted a happy ending,
and got one, a fairy tale
to undo the melancholy
of too-long winters.
Bozhe moi, let him have the girl.

Or, Nureyev chose the death-leap.
Rothbart and the swan-bride
soar heavenward, the gay prince
relieved to be spared the horror
of a tutu wedding night.

And, in New York, two suicides
break Rothbart's spell.
The lovers ascend
in Wagner apotheosis.

Or, Odette is condemned
to be just a swan,
a haggard water-fowl.
The disillusioned prince
stands there and sulks.
Maybe they'd roast her
for the wedding feast.

Or The Prince and Rothbart wrestle.
In their exhausting struggles,
both drown. Odette remains,
the nineteenth swan, odd-out
in every choreography.

Or The eighteen swans
peck Rothbart to death.
Owl-feathers and bones
sink to the lake's bottom.
Odette and Siegfried
take bows and marry.

Or, a promise being a promise,
Siegfried marries Odile,
the bad swan, becomes
the sorcerer's son-in-law.
Odette droops wings,
Swan Cinderella.

2
Swan Lake in Pittsburgh

Disheartened by happy ending
tacked on to Tchaikovsky's
gloom-ridden ballet —
the drowned white swan Odette,
the drowned Prince Siegfried
seen floating past, as good as new
on Lohengrin's swan-raft —

Really? Amid lamenting coda,
piled high with tragedy,
this Disney charade
so that little girls in tutus
sitting in the balcony
don't go home crying?

Odette's body, swollen,
entangled in algae,
washed up on shore
three days ago.

As for the Prince,
he was found, a "floater"
beneath the Sixth Street Bridge.
Eels came from his mouth
when they hooked
the bloated corpse.
The grieving Queen
is inconsolable.

Rothbart, that bloated owl,
swan-pimp,
still lords it
with the eighteen virgins
he lured away to suicide
(three rivers here, and lots
of unhappy girls!).
Each night they rise
and dance their cygnette
sarabande, with a harp,
a violin and a cello.
Other young men
they will lure to drowning.
That filthy owl,
man-hating sorcerer,
knows only this game
and never loses.

Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village

This is a very old poem-sequence. It dates back to the 1970s when I was living in New York but still obsessed with the little lake-side village of Edinboro, PA, where I had attended college. This "Tableaux" was in my 1973 collection as just a series of nature impressions. All four parts are about the lake, the trees and plants around it, the bats and ducks and frogs. The central part is a meditation on the eons-long battle between lake and shore: vegetation wants to fill things in; water wants to have its way. There are no people in this poem, other than the poet-observer. I think this revision has made the poems more than they were before (the war sequence now cast completely in blank verse). The last part is a Whitmanesque cry of joy at one sight of spring willow trees against a gray sky, a sublime moment. So here it is, as it will appear in my next book.

Tableaux from a Pennsylvania Village

1
Cloud Actors
Spotlit to the last,
the thunderheads recede
southeast, in sunset red,
like hoary-headed thespians
unwilling to exeunt
without a proper flourish.

Inside the clouds,
the stubborn lightning
flashes, as if another act
of Hamlet or Lear
required its illumination.
The last of day
does not take curtain calls,
trailing the curtain of eventide
it rolls off the storm’s advance
into the night’s
dark amphitheater.
The lights go out.

2
The Bats At Dusk, The Ducks Withdraw
See them now, dart silhouette
in their new-bird pride!
The bats — presumptuous mice —
take wing, upwards on a twilit wind,
downwards into a gnat-rich dusk.

As ducks float south,
the backs of white mallards
turn like the final page
of a silk-lined novel,
flap shut in sun-gem’s fall
from weeping willow tapestry.

From the bridge I eye flock’s
     cooling retreat, 
the “V” of their coming
an almost-“A” arrow departing
passive in downstream current,
each quack from on the water
answered by croak
from a somnolent frog.
Above the processional,
the celebrant fledermice,
afloat on sonar-guided updraft,
feasting on bug-fest 
     with open mouths,
squeak-flap chitter their exultation,
beat on past dusk
     toward the stars.

3
War of the Lake Against Its Borders
In war, old men give out the orders —
      the young men march out and die.
The already-dead in their Civil War,
World War One and Two grave plots, silent lie,
drum-taps and bugles and epaulets gone.
Nothing down there in the lakeside graveyard
but pine-box rot and the long slur of worms,
but up here, the ancient maples have made
against wind and water, a palisade,
gray warriors stiff-stern at the lake-edge. 
They bend their grave green heads in counsel, brush
shagged samaras in a windy tumult,
send gossip-squirrel couriers to branch-
end, the golden leaflets propelling down,
leaf-pile wind-pushed advance to battlefield.
They argue tactics, instruct the saplings,
shudder in windy speeches, arthritic.
They are the proud maple-leaf generals. 
The Lake is their ancient, blind nemesis.
A hundred years they have contained him. 
Root-strong, they know they will one day surround
and absorb him, tame him to pond, to puddle.
to a mere widening of snow-filled creeks.

His Majesty the Lake must be content
to weave a plot for the millennium,
to gnaw on pebbles ignominious,
to swell with the creek-and-rainfall tribute,
smug at the man-made dam that deepened him.
He dreams of expanded borders, does naught
but lap his decadent breakers, weak-wan 
against sand and silt of the pebbled shore,
hunched in the kettle the glaciers carved him.
He frightens no one, looks to mystic clouds
for auguries, sleeps in the afternoons,
interrogates the fishes and flotsam,
attempts to read news from the incoming Braille 
of pelting rain drops (all reassuring),
traces lake’s ice cracks in dead of winter
but fails to detect the coded messages.
No one betrays the tree-army’s secrets.

Now it is spring. The officers conspire,
draw from sun-dew a seedling explosion.
They raise up a line of green colossi:
rusty, bellicose day lily dragons
issue their challenge to cowardly waves.
Others are drafted, too: spies creep
toward the water in a bed of moss.
Fern leaves unfurl their flagrant green pennants.
Foot soldier fungi pop up red-capped, spores 
ready to replenish their short-lived selves.
Roots furrow underground, touch hands and hold.

Lake’s King has weapons, too: one night a fog
clouds up the foe’s senses in fairy mist.
Then comes the rain — an equinoctial storm —
A night of cold downpour — a deluged day —
a night more of of starless, moonless cloudburst.
Waves batter-ram the tree-line barricades.
Muscles renewed and tendons vivified,
he roars like an ocean, spews tidal spray.

The border army breaks, then mends, then holds.
Where roots had lost the soil to cling to,
a tree falls willingly to barricade
with leaf and limb and sundered trunk.
Where water attempts to break the land,
elsewhere, a rope-tough vine, a wild-rose thorn,
a dead-tree pike-shaft punctures him. Roots hold.
Howling and humbled the Lake-King retreats.
His waves recede to a mirror stillness.

At sun-up, the silver orb of Venus
looks down and sees her own slender crescent;
bird echoes bird arc in parallel flight;
each cloud regards his symmetric brother.
The tangled flora begins to heal itself.
Who won the war? Look at the lake edge now,
see that parade-line stiff and pluming there,
as day lilies burn gold against the light!

4
Stormy Day in Spring
No one goes out on these cloudy days.
The forest is empty. A willow tree
burns in first green, vibrant
against a red-gray skillet of clouds.
Was green ever greener than this?
This is the secret hue of spring,
saved for the rainy-day elite!

The civilized ones! They are all indoors
with damp umbrellas, their soggy shoes drying,
while I stand here on the stream bed,
alone as though their world had ended.
I look at the backs of houses: no one
comes down to the stream-bed
to exult with me in willow-rapture.

Keep your clapboards and chimneys!
Give me this brooding, north-born sky,
the ardent chill of this windy noon —
give me a little sun — a beam or two
to slice the scudding rain clouds.
Splash rainbows on the canopy
of gray and brown and emerald.

Give me this — there is nothing sweeter
than this encompassing embrace!
To be alive, alone
amid the willows and the indifferent rain,
to be at the apex of consciousness —
to feel the very pulse of life evolving —
green! green and alive upon the world!