The Bubble

Falling in love with someone who later "discovers Jesus" is painful, and the ending is not a happy one. Jesus almost always wins. I found a "juvenilia" poem from my freshman years at Edinboro, still rife with rhymes (a perversion that Whitman wold cure me of), but I was able to touch it up so that I am no longer quite so embarrassed. It's the thought that counts.

THE BUBBLE

by Brett Rutherford

We rule an earth but microns thin,
you and I — we ride on separate
hemispheres in yinyang nevercatch
pursuit — my love and your fear,
spinning and tiding a fevered
planet. A Titan, Kronos, grows
within, grinds nostrils on the pane
of the mind's cool underside:

this shadow of a shadow shouts
its name is God, it slobbers
catechist, Faith-fanged.


The reason'd Sphere is hard —­
a perfect tomb for fiends,
but now our Bubble breaks apart
in demon arm-and-leg flex,
and simple Truth is lost to air.
I love in vain. You flee in terror.


Kronos is loose in the world.

The Thing, unchained, must have its lust
and wrenching out its prison bars,
slays lovers, knocks thrones to rubble,
grinds genius back to dust.
Its vacant eye usurps the stars.


I go to a place of exile.
There is no room for you
and me, and a rampaging deity.

God-love destroyed our love.
God-love destroys everything.
So, let's be only Truth
in one another's eyes
Let's summon Things As They Are,
till every Demon dies.

At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit up this early poem, "October 1967" from The Pumpkined Heart. We all thought the world was coming to an end soon. The Vietnam War divided the country. People were threatening "hippies" with violence. In this "nature poem," written amid the violence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, about the remembered lake and the carillon music from the bell tower, I felt the isolation and anxiety. 
Edinboro State College's carillon bells (real or a recorded) could be heard from afar. I remember going to class hearing "Musetta's Waltz," and coming out of class in the dark hearing Anton Rubinstein haunting melody, "Kammenoi Ostrow." The memory of the Rubinstein music against a fall-winter horizon bleak enough to be Russian, stayed with me.
Now I have rewritten this and added some current allusions, so that it is of 2018, although 95% of the poem is my 20-year-old voice speaking with the trees.  This poem had been excluded from my Anniversarius autumn cycle, but this revision is now counted as part of that grouping. [Revised and expanded again, May 2019.]

ANNIVERSARIUS 44:
AT THE LAKE'S EDGE

by Brett Rutherford

Scorched by the blind frost, the maple leaves are dead,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag, or they are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of identity,
chopped to mulch for next year's garden.


Bird flocks rise in arrow-shaped vectors,
riding the west winds up to escape us.
Leaves fall; they flee.


While all this leaf-holocaust
this flight-to-south abandonment
by nations of birds goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps cornstalk
and the irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?


Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through tree-bared acres 
to the dark line of leaden pines,
mark how the shadows grow bold in the slanting dusk
(it is a warning!), mark how the wind
now sighs like one who cannot be consoled
by hopes about the coming election. Death
weaves through the browning, rigid cat tails.
Bored, they lean sere and childless
by the drained swamp; soon their roots
will meet a gravel barricade, soon
water drained, a concrete wall no seed
can scale, nor root circumference.


The blasted oak wears its dead leaves
as a stubborn beard, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers
wait like mastodons at glacier-edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.
You and I are not part of them, and a third 
of the insects are already gone.)


From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kammenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.
I go to the shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,
sere fathers as old as any gravestone here.
A few leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a defiant dust-devil.
They will return with me
to join my curiosity cabinet
of preserved loves, gelled moments.

Autumn is not and never will be
an ending. Autumn piled on itself
is a bottomless leaf-pile. Plunge in!
Stand here amid the dying bell-tone,
as wind that tasted tundra slaps
your face awake with icy needles.
Kammenoi Ostrow fades to silence.

Where does one make a stand for life?
There is nothing north of you,
and little cause to bird-flee southward.
This is the edge of the world.
This is where the first snow falls.

Subjects: Edinboro, Kammenoi Ostrow, autumn poems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC8ah61cMNw

Go Into Exile, or Remain and Suffer?

Many Russian poets and writers fled into exile to get away from Lenin and Stalin. Most Russian exiles were miserable and depressed. Many Russian writers and poets who remained were imprisoned, or murdered. Anna Akhmatova remained, and her brave lyric poems are Russian icons now. Here is my translation/adaptation of her poem about the choice of fleeing or remaining. Food for thought as some of us think of leaving the United Snakes.

ANNA AKHMATOVA: I'M LIKE A RIVER

Adapted from the Russian by Brett Rutherford

I'm like a river
this heartless epoch turned
from its accustomed bed.
Strayed from its shores
this changeling life of mine
runs off into a channel.

What sights I've missed,
absent at curtain time,
nor there when the house lights dim.
A legion of friends
I never chanced to meet.
Native of only one abode —
city I could sleepwalk
and never lose my way —
my tears preventing eyes
from seeing the dreamt-of
skylines of foreigners!

And all the poems I never wrote
stalk me, a secret chorus
accusing me, biding the day
they'll strangle me.
Beginnings I know,
and endings too,
and living death,
and that which I'll not,
if you please, recall.

Now there's a woman
who's assumed my place;
usurping my name, she leaves
me only diminutives to end
my poems with: I'll do the best I know with them.

Even the grave appointed me
is not my own.
Yet if I could escape my life,
looking straight back at what I am,
I should at last be envious.

Subjects: Russian poetry, Akhmatova, translations, exile.

The Place of Attics

What they say about New England and all the people confined to attics is really true. It is really true.

THE PLACE OF ATTICS

by Brett Rutherford

Hard-rock New England
is a world of attic-dwellers:
spinsters and hermits,
bloodlines of schizophrenia,
tight-shut clapboards,
paint-peeled shutters,
a baleful eye behind
a soiled lace curtain.

Who passed the picket-fence
and glanced into the parlor
as Lizzie Borden
wiped clean the ax-edge,
returned to her bed
with a migraine?

Who idled in Salem
at the old spice shop
as Hester Prynne,
a half-moon frowning
upon her scarlet letter
took basket to market,
and who, averting her gaze,
passed by what locked door
to eavesdrop on Arthur Dimmesdale
self-flogging, his blood beads
spelling the eternal A?
In Adams Fall, We Sinnèd All.

What batly belfry, bell-less
shadowed the wily minister
and his impish daughters,
as they bent pins for the witch-trial —
the spitting pins
they plan to blame on the innocent hag
whose farm and lands they covet?

From what high steeples
does what avenger look down
as the merchant’s gold plate,
the fine furnishings,
the pastoral landscapes,
swell three floors high,
on gold from selling
rum to the Negroes,
molasses to the distillers,
slaves to the sugar planters? 

What starry owl repines
beneath a rotting gable
to survey with unblinking eye
as the miser millionaire
shuffles by, slow-paced
in phlegmy wheeze,
walking a mile in old shoes
to find the cheapest chowder?

Does any widow’s watch
stand guard at night
as trucks roll by,
as slit-eyed criminals
dump toxic waste
behind the schoolyard,
or a barge tips oily sludge
into the harbor?

Up on that mansard height
of City Hall, does even one
of those peregrine falcons
take count of a dollar’s passage
from crack-smoke car-seat 
to bicycle boy,
to the convenience store,
to basement warehouse,
to the unseen drug lord? 

No Athens, Providence:
madhouse-state capital. 
The roads are blocked. 
Hotel rooms lock from the outside in. 
Thieves smirk on the doorsteps; 
they boast of useless crimes, 
confess to hasty interments. 
A tree-squirrel once heard one say
to his baseball-capped brother:  
“I’m just going to rob and rob
      until someone stops me.”

Nothing on high does anything.
The steeples jab Heaven’s eye.
Monotonous, the bells ring on.
Men climb church walls on moonless nights
to steal the lightning rods,
the copper strips from roof to ground.
They’d scrape the gold-leaf halos
from off the painted saints if they could.
The sombre, brown, cathedral ceiling
looks like a never-cleaned toilet bowl.
Hordes hunch in rain each spring,
kneel in a shrine for guidance,
while priests’ hands inch unseen
toward the choirboys’ backsides.
Our Lady among the crawling rats,
tear-streaked in verdigris,
blesses all in diapason tone.

My neighbor, from rooftop eyrie
shouts out from his blackened windows:
“You’re all going to die! All of you!
You’re all going to die.” Another night:
“I want a brain! I want a brain!”
he howls till squad cars’ arrival,
then hurls his television to shards
on the sidewalk below.

On just my block, one attic dweller,
a landlady’s schizophrenic son, hacks
endlessly in smoker’s cough, tubercular;
another houses twin infants mongoloid;
another, a white-haired granny who thrusts
her head out, Medusa locks and all,
to scream at any long-haired man who passes.

I did not live in an attic there, the gods
be thanked, but I wrote in one.

[Revised and expanded May 2019]

SUBJECTS: attics, New England, Rhode Island, Hester Prynne, Lizzie Borden, Providence, insanity, Salem

Death and the Maiden

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

by Brett Rutherford

after the German of Matthias Claudius

The Maiden:

Pass me by, oh, pass me by!

Go, savage skeleton!

I am still young. Go, seducer,

and don't reach out for me!

Death:

Give me your hand,

you delicate child.

My hand is friendly,

not punishing.

I am not savage. Be brave!

These bony arms shall guard

your tender sleep.

Image: Hans Baldung Grien. 1518-20 Death and the Maiden. Oil on panel Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel Public domain.

SUBJECTS: Matthias Claudius, translations, Dance of Death, Grien

Let Them Play!

From Scottdale, PA in my childhood. My grandmother, Olive Trader Rutherford, tells me stories from her mother, Mary Ellen White Trader, who was a Mingo Indian. I just wrote this, in a torrent. The voice of the long-gone great-grandmother is in boldface type.

LET THEM PLAY!

by Brett Rutherford

“Mother, would you call the girls in? It will be dinner soon,”
Aunt Margie shouts from back in the kitchen.
I sit with my grandmother on the cool porch glider.
Across the street and on up the park's hill, her daughters climb
the steep sliding board and breeze down its shiny, polished curves.
Up again, downsliding, exulting the brief up-skirt blush,
legs not tiring, up again, down again, dolls put aside
in favor of the giddy height, the pull of gravity.
On a higher-up hillside, boys scale a tree, ride swing-sets
out and up almost to escape velocity. Ray guns
have replaced cap pistols, star-dreams of rockets in their heads.

My grandmother just smiles. “Oh, let them play!” she says to me.
“Another story I know, that I can tell you, aside
from the back-and-forth of the secret names of animals
(she never finished that one!) is why I say Let them play.
My mother told me true, one day in the clearing, The day
will come when you have two, three, or half a dozen children,
and you will treat each one as a new-found jewel, a pearl,
a lump of gold. Then you will want to keep each one at home,
in sight, never to leave your guarding. I say, Let them play!

Let them run in the woods. Let them chase and be chased.
Let them bite and be bitten. Let them climb up tree and rock,
wash their own little wounds in a clear, calm stream. Do not call
them until the last possible moment, till bread-crust cools
and the meat is singed black on the open fire. Let them play!

“Why, mother,” I asked, ‘should I let them run so late,
until it is so dark I can hardly see them coming? ”

It happened, she said, not here, but three villages
down creek and around the sharp-peaked mountain.
It was the time of harvest dance, a thank-you stomp to sun
and sky, just when all the trees had gone crisp and color-up,
a night when all the men would drum and dance on till midnight,
and songs would go on until it was too cold to sing
another, and the fires grew ashy and dim. With sweet fruit
and sassafras tea and honey the children and their dolls
were sent to bed, tucked in and hugged, warned that the Wendigo
must not be permitted to see them. No child was to peek.
No child was allowed to stand in pretend-dancing that night.

In their long-house beds, the children fidgeted, their blankets off,
their blankets on as they heard the drum beats, the water-drums,
the shrill flutes, the deep-voice song of the men. One, whose name was
Not-For-You-To-Know, blew into a gourd and made sounds.
The women's chant answered, high and low. They all watched,
as those shimmering stars — the Seven – what do you call them?”

“The Pleiades, grandmother?”

“Yes, the Pleiades!”

“My mother called them something else, but she showed me
their glittering up-rise from the edge of the world. She told me:

As the lonely, the desolate, the shimmering sisters crept
from the edge of the earth into the peak of the sky.
They could not harm the dancers – too far and too weak
in their sad darkness — but the children! "Ah!” she puts her hand
to her bosom and gasps, and pauses — “Mother!”
comes the call from Aunt Margie again. “Please call them in!”
Grandmother leans close to me and continues,
channeling again her own mother’s speaking:

But the children were not tired. Far from it. The song-dance twitched
in all their fingers and toes; their knees and elbows jabbed out
at one another in their beds. The straw ejected them.
They sat up They crawled unseen into the dark-on-darkness. 
In the shadow of the longhouse, no one could see them go.
And they began to dance! They danced! Up, knees! Down, feet!
The lonely spinster Pleiades, childless, saw them dancing.
They were light as feather-down, the children. They joined their hands
All their feet went up at once. A little breeze lifted them.
The Pleiades with bird-claw fingers, lonely among stars,
ah! how they wanted to have their own sons and daughters! —

“Mother! Do I have to go get them myself?
I know you’re out there. I heard the glider squeak.
I hear the two of you talking!” Aunt Margie calls, close by
from the living room, the smell of apple pie-cinnamon 
wafting out to us.

“Not quite yet, daughter,” my grandmother calls back assuringly.
“They’re right where I can see them!” I look at her expectantly. 
“And then? And then?” (Not another unfinished and interrupted tale!)

And then! she answers me. While all the elders are thanking
the sun and the moon and all the good winds, thanking the Crow
for not taking more than his share, and the Bear for forbearing 
to tear up the bark and logs of the longhouse —
a whole long, ancient list of Thanksgivings you can be sure,

The children are all trying to echo them, and just at
Crow-Thanks and Bear-Thanks, just when they hear
the elders address the Snow, that he should
not come too soon this winter nor stay on too long —
by then the Pleiades have got the children, the big ones
first, full of ten years, the not-so-big ones so full of corn
and six or seven years, even the sachem’s dear son!,
even the tiny ones whose dance was no more than a stumble 
foot-stamp. All of them up! All of them higher than cornstalks, 
higher than trees at the edge of the clearing. Fog-fingered 
and jewel-eyed childless sisters of the cold space of night —
they took them screaming into the ink-black sky. Children, gone!

That is why their village was abandoned, empty. We passed
it with sadness and shuddering along the way. We wept:
their name was soon gone at the Council Fire.

I look at her in disbelief. “I have said.” she finishes.

“Mother!” Aunt Margie shouts, her face appearing close-up
behind the porch screen-door. 

“Let them play, I say!” grandmother repeats. “Let them play
until they are so tired they drop to sleep! It is that time
of year. It is November and the night sky is lonely.”

“Those stories again!” Aunt Margie complains. Her hands go up
as though to block her ears. “Why tell your grandson those stories?”

Grandmother stands. Her tiny profile and her jet black hair
defy her tall daughter. “I have said, or memory dies.”
Soon the exhausted daughters are called inside to dinner.

[Revised at Lake Atsion NJ, April 2019)

SUBJECTS: Mingo Indians, Native American stories, Olive Rutherford, Pennsylvania, Pleiades, Seven Sisters, Scottdale.

Poet's Press Authors Listed

The Poet's Press catalog page has been edited to make navigation easier. Look at the right-hand column to see poets by name, and the links underneath let you jump to their books. The catalog page is reverse-chronological so that newer books are always on top, so this author-link listing will help you find the poets you are interested in. And don't forget to look at our free archives.

Here are a few of the listings, or clock below to see the whole page.

Joel Allegretti

• Plague Psalms
• Father Silicon

Jody Azzouni

• Hereafter Landscapes
• Lust for Blueprints

Moira Bailis

• Collected Poems

Richard Davidson

• Song of Walt Whitman

Claudia Dikinis

• First Poems

Emilie Glen

• Emilie Glen Vol 1
• Emilie Glen Vol 2
• Emilie Glen Vol 3
• Emilie Glen Vol 4

Emily Greco

• Things to Do When Dead

Go to Poet's Press Catalog Page

Thunderpuss, In Memoriam

I've been 31 years without my Siamese cat companion, Thunderpuss. I have, over the years, adopted two semi-feral cats, they were never really cat-companions, just guests who were happier outdoors than in. Long-time friends of The Poet's Press knew her well, and her paw-prints are on a number of our books. This is my farewell.

THUNDERPUSS: IN MEMORIAM

by Brett Rutherford

1
At the end
you are lilac —

sun filters
through holes
in the carrying case —
frail lilac
tinged on white

your fur
a rumpled coat
no longer sleek
on skeleton

legs too weak 
for running now,
your leaps
misguided
end in confusion

yet you are lilac still
eyes blue
as Siamese skies.

You come out of the box
all kitten,
ready to explore, 
eager to know,

yet terrified,
into the hands
of the doctor

2
Print shop cat
tracked through open ink cans
to autograph
the works of poets
with indelible paw prints.

Always underfoot
intractably neurotic
from the start

an all-night howler
in heat more than out

toms on the roof
   at the cat-door window

toms taking turns
working in shifts

not even bothering
to fight
for your inexhaustible
yearning

steel spring queen
of a city of orgies. 

3
Your leaps
were prodigious —

from floor to door-top

straight up curtains
bookshelves like ladders

nothing would daunt
your interest in ceilings,
high places,
hunter's eye view.

Even the ledge
between two office windows
too narrow for turning
did not defeat you —

you simply walked backwards,
regained the sill,
jumped to the floor
like a film in reverse.

4
From hellcat
you grew civilized,

calmed to the sound
of Handel and Mozart,
sat rapt at the foot
of my harpsichord,

tempered the leaps, 
the claws-out landings.

A gentle reminder
from a water pistol
cured you of scratching
the furniture.

You grew to dignity
yet never shed the pride
of an aristocrat.

No one could pick you up
yet you would deign
to throne a lap
with your presence,

accept a suitable interval
of petting,

the obsequies
that mortals owe
to incarnate beauty.

5
Dreaming
     you were more real
than waking

dreaming
     you could escape
     the dull perimeter
     of print shop
     of studio apartment
     of four rooms in New Jersey 

to pad a crystal jungle
     stalk forest floors
     cross deserts
     converse with demons

bask in a sun that never sets

await the arrival 
of your leopard king
whose sleek black fur
and amber eyes
are your eidolon
of Beauty.

I watched you dreaming:
the twitch of eye,
the paw extended,
the clench and unclench
of your jaws

tried to imagine the place
that lured you,
its feline geometry
one leap beyond
my human faculty.

I'd wake sometimes
to find you sitting there
upon my chest
eyes huge as moons

staring    staring —

perhaps you too 
brooded
on sleep and death,

waited for my
awakening
and asked yourself

Where does he go?

6
Only a grudging carnivore,
you were happy
with that bloodless stew,

those maddeningly crunchy
stars and tidbits,

those tins of neatly
chopped and compressed tuna.

Once, growling with
animal rage, you came back
with a mouse in your jaws; 

once, the house was filled
with sparrow feathers;

now and then, you'd catch
and swallow something
with too many legs

run for the water bowl
to wash it down. 

But near the end
you sat on sun-porch
surrounded by finches
and feeding sparrows

no glint of killing
in your blue eyes
calm as a storybook saint
preaching to wildlife

pensive as a Buddha
counting the sunfalls
toward Nirvana

7
We became one person,
shards of the same crystal,

mirrors
of one another's moods

you were always there
     protesting my absence
     before the key
          could readmit me

you at the end
     of every journey

running to rustle
     of grocery bag

someone to shop for
     catnip at Christmas 
     a rabbit-fur mouse
     a length of twine
     a boneless breast
          of special chicken

8
A burglar came
through the downstairs window.
I frightened him off —

black leopard man
with amber eyes
leaped from the porch
over the fence
gone like a nightmare.

I wanted Death
to stalk you silently,
visit your sleep
like that intruder

surprise you gently,
take you from me
like a thief.

But when I find
that you can barely walk,
that you will not eat,
see you convulsed with seizure, 
I must become
the agent of Death,
must temper him
with kindness. 

I did not want
to choose the time
of your going.
Making the appointment
I gasped to spell
my name to the clinic,

shaking with grief
and more than grief.

It was not done in a daze.
The sun was brilliant.
Cats watched from every window
as I walked with blue box
toward the clinic.

It was the third of September.
Summer had died in the trees
the night before, blinked out
like Merope, the lost Pleiad.
Stars burned invisible
over the daytime sky.

I talked nonsense
to your moaning
     jabbered about 
     going for a walk
     calm down
     we're
     almost
     there 

9
Your absence
is palpable

like nerves
to an amputated limb

I still feel you
about to step
around the corner
of the sofa

hear you leap
from stovetop
to chair
to floor

the silken rustle
on carpet
claw clatter
on floorboards.

But these presentiments
are false now:

you are dust mote
rising to icy air,
a final leap
into unbeing,

you are ashes,
gray with a hint of lilac. 

SUBJECTS: Siamese cat, cat memorial, Thunderpuss, Providence.