At the Top of the World

by Brett Rutherford

Is the mountain the object of climbing?
Does the act of climbing alone suffice?
I say, To climb is to achieve that height
     from which, alone,
you can scan the overarching beauty
of a curved horizon filled with summits.
It is not the triumph of reaching top,
but the sudden and dizzying knowledge
that what you scale is but a single hair
on the bristled, old beard of the cosmos.

See now the range of upthrust pyramids
on which you perch, a height-giddy rider
on the hump of a thousand-mile camel,
a speck on the Andes’ anaconda.
Blue peaks, pure snow, kingdom-encompassing
rainbows, stark shadows cast as lambent sun
inks fold on fold of airbrush shading
upon the distant ranks of staggered hills —
all this you spy, and make out something more:

upon each mountaintop
    is the form of yet another climber,
your brother who stands and regards you,
     eye-to-eye your equal.
Or sometimes, in a condor solitude,
you find the driven spike and banner-mark
left by a climber who has come and gone.

Sometimes a scaled peak is vacant, but, lo!
Take hold the rock and gaze down vertiginous,

and see that a figure is scaling upward towards you.

Is it the same for all who struggle
     out of the shadows into the sun?

You cannot turn back. You belong no more
     to the towns and folk of the settled valleys,
where they see only your shadow pass,
     and fear it: to them
you are a spectre now, a name
     that induces a shudder.

Down there, they hone

     their knives and swords,
covet, enclose their neighbors’ fields.
Their cannons spark —
     this way — that way —
in the depths of distant gorges,
their bloated and river-hugging cities
engulfed in flames
as each invades the other.

Could you go down and tell them?

Could you stop carnage they so revel in?
No! Thin air and star-glory,
     cloud-food and fog
are now your homeland,

     a cold rock your throne.

On what goes on below,
crusaders on horseback,
earth-drilling rape of the mantle,
the belching sulfurous hell-fires,
the gods and their mountains
look down in scorn.

[Revised 2018, revised again May 2019].

2018 revision

Wotan Meets Siegfried

by Brett Rutherford

You, Wanderer,
     graybeard and granite-skinned,
          obdurate in wind, leaning
          upon an ancient staff:
what storm
brews now inside
those stony silences?

You loved
     a woman once, a son
     sprung from her easily —
     through him, a son again.
Is that the boy,
     now climbing the crag
     to goat heights,
     his golden locks
     a laugh
     at your receding gray?
Who are you,
     anyway, the stripling asks,
     under that hat?
     Why is its brim so wide,
     why does it droop
     across your face like that?
You answer
     uneasily, It is the way
     of travelers to bend
     a hat against the wind.
He spies
     your missing eye,
     your need to defend
     a sightless side.
     Somebody else whose way
     you blocked, no doubt
     he plucked that eye out?

Taunting,
     the young man edges
     to pass,

     barred by
     your swifter arm,
     your staff of ash.

You know him now:
     Siegfried, son of Sigmund.
     You say: The eye I lost
     is one of the ones you use
     to see the one I have left.

He is not much for riddles.
Lunging, he breaks your staff.

He pushes you aside
like an inconvenient boulder.


You have nothing to tell him
he cares to hear about.
Like father, like son:
even with ravens to help,
you never saw anything coming, either.
Entropy scorns the immortal.

[Revised May 2019]

On Rhyming Poetry

by Brett Rutherford

     A parody of Barbara Holland’s “Black Sabbat”,

     upon the occasion of being forced

     to listen to doggerel)

Thou shalt not suffer a rhyme
     to live;
thou shalt not suffer a rhyme.

for rhymes are tedious
merely in their existence.

Four hundred years ago you
     bored us on the page,
now in this steel-stitched century
     you tease us!

Often I have been aware of you,
of your comings and goings
     at the end of the line,
but it was not until I saw
     the pack of you,
a word-snarl of mouthing lips,
bloated with overscanning,
count-fingering, thumbs in the heart
of a rhyming dictionary —
drinking the blood of a line
that was good by accident
in the gray wet light of high school ...

until I saw you fawning before
that goat-headed one
to whom you pledged Art
on pain of strangulation —

Desist! No more. Some poems
may walk the railroad track of verse,
but do not call your hammered-rhyming
thing a Poem. Begone, gadfly! Shut up,
you sledgehammer-pile-driving woodpecker!

The Plasma Physicist Explains

by Brett Rutherford


If you want to understand me,
it’s all in the science, really.
I am not like men.
I am not like women.
I am not an animal at all.
I am the fourth state of matter.

The soul of me
is a plasma core,
my heat contained
in vacuum walls
no cry can penetrate.

Swift currents and fields
hold me in check.
My delicate bell
of unprotected truths
must not be touched,

for I am lethal:
I have the sun’s
incarnate eye chained here.
It is all I can do
to hold it in.

Come not too close.
Do not inquire
what burns within.
I have coped too long
with the break of heart
to need a supplement
to my magnetic fields.

Though I bulge out
ionosphere coronas,
and Northern Lights splay
through the bullet holes
of once-attempted affections,

my furies are self-contained.
A detonation was imminent
when someone came too close,
but one look at my lightning
is usually enough of a warning.

Orbit me at a safe distance.
Be warmed by what I generate.
If space and speech
did not restrain your hand,
if any speck of you leapt to my heart
it would become a barren nucleus
chained like the rest of me
into this welded egg of fire.

No need to feel sorry.
I am fine in here. I will last
as long as sunlight, till gravity
calls everything home to null.


[Revised May 2019]

A Haight-Ashbury Autumn

by Brett Rutherford

     I must sing of the void.
Cacophony I chant,
and the gray sombre Chaos
     of October.
Unfolding days in the twilight of equinox:
chill morning fog and dew,
sleeping-bag runaways
stirring for incense and donuts.
I miss my Appalachian Fall
with its red and yellow blaze:

This is Haight Street
     in western autumn
     where no leaves
     aggregate orange
rust the earth,
just brown and grey,
a pitiful deciduous
protest against sun-slant.
No leaf-piles here to play in,
for down past Stanyan
in Golden Gate Park,
citymen cart them away
to great white incinerators.

I walk the park woods at night
yearning for the crisp of maple,
the underfoot carpet. Musk smell
and eucalyptus mock me.

Above, a meteor winks:
a falling star attains its own glory
in leaf-drop immolation.
Gone, yes, 
                    but it was up there!

1967, rev. 2019

Who Cares to Listen to Songs? (A Russian Poem)

     Translated by Brett Rutherford
     from the Russian of Anna Akhmatova

Who cares to listen to songs

now that the prophecy of bitter days is true?

Hear me, old songs: the world has ceased

its being marvelous.

So hush, and do not break my heart.

Like swallows, not long ago

you led the morning out, ignoring its risks.

Now songs must lead a desperate life,

begging for crumbs at strangers’ doors.

Out-Home Summers

by Brett Rutherford 

 1 

“You’ll eat those words.”
We did: they sprang from the dirt,
ringed in the hearts of tomatoes,
bad news and outrageous claims
for miracle cures, crosswords
and obits ground up in pulp; 

words we put in the ground
with the tomato starters —
on hands and knees in the garden,
we wrapped the roots
in old newspapers,
a wood-pulp wall
against the hungry worms. 

Grandmother explained:
by the time worms ate
through the paper, the plants
were tall and sturdy. 

At night I wondered
if the root hairs read
about Russia and fallout
before they sucked
the paper dry
of lampblack ink, 

whether the red fruit cared
which party came to power,
or how tomato red was a color
to call someone a traitor with; 

whether we are what we eat
as last season’s news fades,
yet stays in our genes,
bone marrow memory of fighting words. 

2 

One time only, I watched
grandmother kill off
an unruly rooster.
Over the executioner’s stump
her hatchet rose and fell,
one deft and practiced chop.

The hated rooster's head

lay there on tree rings
in a red pool, while
the rest of the bird
made tracks for the forest,
blood jetting in air.
The dog ran after, gleefully. 

I looked down at the chicken’s
baleful, taciturn eye.
Did he regret now
the vicious leg-pecking
that led to his demise?
Did he disdain the race
the rest of him was having now,
in which the dog would surely
     triumph?
The open-beaked, expressionless
head just lay on the block,
as dignified as a bust
of a Roman emperor. 

The dog retrieved
the exhausted victim,
now off to the plucking. 

Each hour I came back 

from the defeathering orgy,
the gutting and cleaning,
to the discarded head.
What was it thinking?
What was it thinking?

It must be thinking something!

3

In early summer wood,
May apples pepper
the pine grove floor,
copperhead snakes flee
my grandmother’s
all-purpose poking and walking stick,
same stick that finds mushrooms,
morels, the best ones,
wherever they hide. 

Pine's lower branch
drapes lawn,
trees hung
with bygone nests,
eggshell debris. 

The black
snake molts,
counting the days
until re-birth and eggs. 

Gone now three years,
grandmother returns.

I know where to find her.

I tear her from earth,
wipe off the sod,
know her face, graven
in May apple, mandrake root 

4

Red sky, 

that summer of twisters
and of Hurricane Hazel,
sent everyone down
to cellar-holes, 

everyone, that is,
except our heathen family,
storm-loving Odin’s kin.

We watched
tornado pitch
rip arms
off poplar men, 

heard not the song
the religious sang below
to bring their god down

to spare their cars and rooftops. 

Safely on screened-in porch
as lightning jabbed everywhere
I made up my own
ascent into sky,
waited for wind
to peel the house
like an onion. 

We were sad when the storm
ended. Everything else
was anticlimax. No one
we knew was carried off
into the funnel’s mouth. 

Still, we would never forget
the wild song of the winds howling. 

5 

Grandfather never worked a day, 
in all the years I knew him.

Content in his tar-papered house,
he sat in his long underwear —
what use to dress except for company? 

But when the tax-day came,
he went to the mines,
spat at the very mention of them,
shamed
if one of his grown sons joined in
to help their Pa pay the property tax.
“I don’t want you going down there,”
he told his son. “No man should have to,
unless it’s that or starving.

I wish I had back the years I went there.” 

Without a nickel between them, then,
they’d hitch a ride to the Hecla mine,
grim-jawed at the thought that earth
might swallow them each time they dropped
into the maw of darkness. 

They left before dawn,
returned in time
to watch the darkening sky
spit diamonds. 

They hung their carbide lamps
by the wash basin,
the musty smell
of acetylene mingled
with soap. 

The tax bill paid, his son
would return to his paper mill
up North. Grandfather went back
to his radio, weeks in long underwear,
the day-count to the welfare check. 

Inside him, where the coughing had
already started, a hardened vein
of dark dust and tar
exploded one night
and killed him, 

as he always knew it would

Writer's Block

by Brett Rutherford

     for Barbara A. Holland 

Figure of speech this is not:

the black monolith
before your door —
so tight a visitor
or the timid mailman
can just squeeze past it
into your vestibule —
is real, and solid. 

This object, taller now
than a double-decker bus,
is clearly out of hand.
Just when the charcoal monolith
popped up in the gutter
     like fungus
is not so important as how
it grew at curbside,
consuming a parking space,
a bus stop,
cracking the Plexiglas shelter
until the smooth black slab
jostled a tree
and warped the sidewalk,
flush to the bottom step
of your brownstone front! 

What is it made of? List all
the known black stones: basalt,
ebony, onyx, obsidian,
lava, jet, or hematite.
No match. Nor is it coal,
charcoal, or carborundum.
It is more like a cenotaph
carved out of frozen shadows. 

Who knows where it
gets its strength?
(Taproots in power-lines,
perhaps, or steam-pipes,
or gas and water mains?)
Does moonlight feed its
blackness? 

It festers there,
absorbing sunlight
like a cubist tarantula,
its height advancing
in bamboo stealth
to the edge of your curtains,
an anxious bird perch
that finally shoots
to rooftop,
five stories now! Five,
and it does not topple! 

Up there, your morning view
must be night, now —
a blank night
without a hint of aurora.
Your darkened rooms
hunch in resentment.
The potted palm
     yellows and dries,
your windowsill
     a hecatomb of withered flowers. 

And all the while 
     your computer dims out,
     that manual typewriter
          from your student days
     refuses a carriage return, 

your fountain pen is clogged,
pencils worn to useless stumps,
as a parallel mountain
of crumpled paper
accumulates. 

Your poems germinate
in beansprout lines,
but the stanzas coagulate
into thought-clot,
as useless as
a castaway scab. 

2 

This state of things
will never do!
I know a consulting shaman
adept at elementals.
He begs for quarters
at the corner of Morton
where it meets Hudson Street.
If you but ask,
he’ll circle your house
with Indian maize
(to the delight of pigeons),
hang a dented silver spoon
on your fireplace mantel.
Then, after a swig
of a sassafras philtre, 

his gap-toothed mouth
will eject dandelion puffs
and the scent of burnt sage;
on fire, he'll pull the tail

     of the Wendigo,
enraging his northern eminence
until its four crossed winds,
its burning feet of fire
converge at the pinch point,
galing down the Hudson River,
huffing from the piers
to your doorstep,
pounding that monolith
flat as a paving stone.
Like melting ice

it will merge with the sidewalk. 

He's done this for others —
but something is always
left behind:
that's why,
at certain corners,
dust devils harry pedestrians
tornado leaves and paper scraps,
raise skirts and strip
the skins off frail umbrellas. 

The shaman’s fee for poets,
since we have less than he has,
is but a cup of coffee
and the promise of an epigraph.
Some lingering vectors
of anarchic wind
are but a small aftermath
of old-fashioned magic.
Lady, the bum’s coffee
at the corner diner is but
a paltry ransom,
for imprisoned sunlight,
fettered typing,
and a hostage pen. 

1980s, Revised and expanded March 2019.

The Rage of Athena at Troy

 by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted, with new material, from Euripides' The Trojan Women

NARRATOR/PRIEST

Athena is wise, is wisdom, but beware her wrath: her name,

her rites, her honor must always be defended, her temple
sacrosanct. Hear her at the fall of Troy, when suddenly

she begs Poseidon to punish the Greeks, her favorites:

POSEIDON

Welcome, Athena! (Ironically) Family love has a magic power. …

I suppose you bring some word from Zeus.

ATHENA

No. I come to entreat your power, aid and alliance

on behalf of Troy — yes, of this place!

POSEIDON

Have you renounced your hatred? Now that it stinks in ashes,

do you pity Troy?

ATHENA

Will you support me?

POSEIDON

Tell me your mind.
(Suspiciously). Is it Greece … or Troy … you are helping?

ATHENA

I am disposed to favor the Trojans, whom I once loathed.

The Greeks are leaving, laden with wealth and women —

make this homeward voyage disastrous for them.

POSEIDON

Why this leaping at random between love and hate?

ATHENA

You know of the insult offered my temple at Troy?

POSEIDON

(Places fingers to forehead, seeing a vision)

Ah! my eyes see it. Ajax athwart the door of your temple.

He is in! He drags a Trojan princess by the hair.

He has torn her from your altar, her offering

still fresh, a heifer unmurdered, a costly robe

upon the knees of your statue. It was —

ATHENA

Cassandra! The self-doomed Prophetess
who threw herself on the mercy of the gods.
He seized her from the sanctuary!

POSEIDON

The Greeks have spoils enough. Are they not shamed?

Must they not return her, that she complete

her sacrifice, her plea for safety beneath your wings?

ATHENA

They have done nothing. No punishment for Ajax,

not even a reprimand. The insult!

POSEIDON

And you, Athena, fought beside them. You rode

the war chariot with Diomedes, you felled

your brother Ares in a single blow!

ATHENA

Help me now to make them suffer.

POSEIDON

(Nods his head in assent, extends his hand).

My powers await your whim, Athena. What shall we do?

ATHENA

I mean to make their homeward journey a long one.

They will part from one another. The sea

will be their undoing, their misery.

Many will wish they had died at Troy.

POSEIDON

(Excitedly). The whole Aegean I'll stir for you; the shores

of Mykonos, Skyros, Lemnos, the reefs of Delos,

the Capherian capes I'll drape with drowned Greeks.

Go back to Olympus and get your father's thunderbolts.

You'll need them. No punishment is strong enough

for those who profane the temples of the high gods.

CHORUS

Athanaia! Athanaia! Xaira Theá!

This excerpt was included in the 2008 pageant-play, Who Is Athena? by Brett Rutherford, performed at The Providence Athenaeum on July 11, 2008. Revised March 2019.

The Warning of Solon the Athenian

I woke up this morning and was seized by the desire to make a new English adaptation of one of the great verse admonitions of all time, attributed to Solon the Athenian, the great king and law-maker. This is based on Demosthenes, "On the Embassy," in which the orator recites from memory these lines by Solon. His warning about civil strife and its costs, and his admonition in favor of wisdom, ring down through the ages. Of course I have adapted his words a little to the present day, and inserted some ideas and images under sudden inspiration, as any poet-translator would do. So here it is: read and tremble.

Athanaia! Athanaia! Xaira Theá!


Athenians! We know that Zeus will never plan our destruction
nor will any of the immortal gods plot against us,
For such is the power of Wisdom, our great-hearted goddess
Athena, daughter of the king of of gods,
she from whose bright temple extends her hands over all
who shelter in this blessed city.


But now her own people, for greed and profit,
risk ruining all, imperil the city itself with foolishness!
The leaders of the Assembly are of unsound mind:
bad morals and pride lead by the leash to a downfall.
Orgied, they know not how to restrain themselves,
or keep behind closed doors their gluttony and lust.
They have grown rich through bribes and malfeasance.
They loot the common land and temples, and steal
from the poor their tiny recompense. They scrawl
their one day's wishes on the tablets of law, rewrite
with their bloated thoughts the ways of our tradition.
The columns of Justice tremble but stand: does She
not know what is and was and has ever been?
Ah! she is silent, but for how long, Athenians?
How long until the truth avenges itself?


When corruption comes, the end is sure as disease
in wasting away the city: men's clouded reason
falls into an evil servitude, fathers and sons
brothers and sisters draw knives against one another
in civil discord and party strife. For no cause at all
except the desire to chaos, they bring us to War —
no matter the cause or pretext, a vile war does naught
but waste the prime and beauty of manhood,
leaving the polis a place of stumped cripples.



In their dark caucuses, yea, even in the Assembly,
they turn the ear to foreign conspirators; they turn
one faction of Athens against another, hating
their fellows more than the dread barbarians.
These evils seep down among the common folk,
those of little reason who but repeat the slogans
repeated o'er and o'er into their wearied brains.


How long will it be, if this goes on,
until our own citizens put on the chains of slavery?
How long until our own brothers are sent abroad
into strange servitude to masters we do not know?
How will we ever bring our kindred home
when their legs and minds are fettered thus?


And so the common evil comes to all, when flags
and bonnets and streaming slogans divide us,
house against house no longer neighbors at all.
Then come the evil officers with false arrest,
armed so that no door can bar their entry.
No matter what wall or hedge he leaps,
the single man cannot escape his judgment,
called before a dark and sinister tribunal.


So my heart bids me to tell you, Athens,
that even as bad government is as a pestilence
among us, good rule is like the cleansing breeze
that dissipates disease and ends disorder.
Wisdom shall hurl the evil-doers down
into the dark cells they have dug themselves
(all the cruel punishments their fevered minds
devised, not even those shall suffice to punish
the traitor who sells his own state to darkness!).


Wisdom shall smooth things out at the end,
if we choose her over hateful Eris, discord's
abominable mistress! She brings excess to order;
she stills the loud folly of bloated outrage.
No longer will weeds spring up in our roadways,
and once again will green abundance bless us
as all can walk freely without fear of slayers.


Wisdom shall straighten crooked judgments.
She tempers the pride of invention and wealth,
even the arrogance of the returning warrior.
The howling works of faction, the wrath of strife,
will gave way to common reason in the assembly.

Heed Athena, your only hope to make all good
and wise and perfect in the bright human world.

Athanaia! Athanaia! Xaira Theá!

Why Poetry?

by Brett Rutherford

In memoriam: Annette Hayn

I see you always
in that photograph:
a Breslau schoolgirl
on a Sunday outing,
resting
beside a woodland path.
Everything is still before you:
in German Silesia
that 1930s forest
where wolves
and elf-kings peeping
from the fern-fronds,
were the only things to fear.

Had you already read
the Schiller plays
with their bold heroes
and valiant women,
the Heine poems,
and the Goethe?

How far beyond those woods
were the Nazis waiting
to deny you the right
to your own German?

You sat in the audience
as Steinberg's hands waved
a brave Beethoven
from the Kulturbund orchestra,
until even Beethoven
was denied you.
The Jewish Kulturbund Orchestra
was banned from playing German music.

Later, the night-boat to England,
to boarding school,
away from the coming horror
of Holocaust —
to America —
to marriage and children.

Something was missing
on those chamber-music afternoons
when your husband tore into
Brahms and Bartok,
excluding you —

no place to be
where the need for purpose
did not haunt you.

The business of the dead
is to be remembered.
The business of survivors
is to bear testimony:
But what is the business
of those who escaped?

Find something,
do something,
your husband urged you.
You had no cello,
no violin —
only your hands,
a pen,
an ear for making word
follow word,
tightrope-walking lines,
stanzas with their own
bright magic.

You found it, finally.
Your world:
      surreally seen,
      Delilah and Noah's wife.
      much to do with doll houses,
      sailboats lost and found,
      the tracery of your children's
      lives and marriages,
      and the friendships found
           among the poets.

You mined your own childhood, too
and found it haunted
by the tread of history:
your father in Breslau
dreading the times to come,
your mother skiing
as though her life depended on it.

The places cannot be recovered:
Breslau obliterated
      by the Red Army
and swallowed into Poland;
the Berlin of your schooldays
a patchwork of memories,
your parents' names unwritten,
      fading from a whisper
           to the never-spoken

but you found your truth at last
in your poems and books,
where your escape
      bookended with silences
gifts us with thoughts
that will not perish.

— October 2, 2004, rev. 2019

Only An Apple

Translated by Brett Rutherford

     after a poem by Plato


      Melon ego. Ballei me philon de tis.
           All' epineudon,
      Xanthippe; kago kai dou marainómetha.


Look! I am only an apple.
Someone just fool enough
to love you, has thrown
me in your general direction.
Catch me, Xanthippe, now!
Tomorrow is too late for both of us:
a rotten fruit in a wrinkled hand.

Through Mirrors

by Brett Rutherford

  I play you through mirrors,  

angled dreamt visions of you  

I catch in candlelight

    halfway across the crowd-cafe

  you are fun-house warped to me

  so close I can almost touch

  each peach-fuzz hair on your cheek.

    You are all there, from head  

long-haired, to slender foot,  

leaner than ever, as thin  

as depth of glass. If I

    touch this, will you yield

  to my phantom?    

I send a ghost-messenger

  to follow your double home.

    There you go. There, with you,

  she (whatever she you deign

  to possess this evening)

  leans on your shoulder.

    My mirror self will follow.

  When he returns

  I'll reap the grief  of his report.

  Your kind  can only be wooed that way.

    You do not see me looking,

  longing. You lurk in corridors

       of cold seduction,

  between the mercury and glass.