Anniversarius 44: At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit 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 die,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag. They are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of all identity,
chopped to mulch for next year’s gardens.

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

                                 While all this leaf-holocaust,
this flee-to-south abandonment
by nations of bird flocks goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps every lone cornstalk
and the dried-out irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?

Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through the tree-bared acres at the line
of dark and leaden pines, black silhouettes
bold in the slanting dusk. A warning take
from the wind’s disconsolate sigh; no hope
can they gain from the coming election.

Death weaves through the browning, rigid cat-tails.
Brittle they lean, seed-shorn and childless now
that the swamp has been drained; their realm will end
at a gravel barricade, a concrete wall
no seed can scale, nor root circumference.

The blasted oak tree wears its own dead leaves,
a bearded miser, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers wait,
silent steel mastodons at glacier’s edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.

You and I are not part of them. A third
of the poor insects are already gone.)

From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kommenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.

I go to the graveyard’s shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,

tree-fathers as old as any tombstone here.
A few yellow leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a sly dust-devil.

They will return with me to join

my curiosity cabinet

of well-preserved loves, and gelled high moments.

Autumn is not and never will be

an ending. Autumn piled up on itself

is a bottomless leaf-pile. Oh, plunge in!

Stand here still hearing the dying bell-tone,

as a 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 to the 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

The Bubble (Revised)

by Brett Rutherford

We rule an earth that is but microns thin,
you and I — we ride on our separate
hemispheres in a yinyang never-catch
pursuit — love in an endless chase of fear,
spinning and tiding a fevered planet. 
A sleepless Titan, Kronos, grows within
grinds forehead and nostrils against the pane
of the mind’s mantle’s, world’s cool underside:
this shadow of a shadow shouts its name. 
It thinks it is God, faith-fanged, it slobbers
souls’ marching orders, taboos and bans.

The reason’d Sphere is hard —­ a perfect tomb
for fiends, inquisitors, and catechists —
but now our bubble planet breaks apart
in demon tentacle arm-and-leg flex,
and simple Truth is lost to air.
I love in vain. You flee in terror’s thrall.
Gnarled old Kronos is loose in the world.

The Titan Thing, unchained, must have its lust
and, wrenching out its adamantine bars,
throws lovers aside, knocks thrones to rubble,
grinds genius back to idiot dust motes.
Its vacant eye usurps the dying stars.

I go to a place of black-hole exile.
There is not room enough for you and me
in bed with that rampaging deity.

God-love destroyed our love. God-love destroys 
everything, a desolated cosmos.
So let us be both love and god
in one another’s worshiping.
Let us set up stock in Things As They Are
and sit beneath our own self-planted trees,
content in hand-grasps till every demon dies.

[Written circa 1967, revised and expanded 2018, revised and expanded again in May 2019.]

When the Vampire Is King

by Brett Rutherford

There are immortal beings, but they are all evil.
Whereas we live on the substance of life, eating
the root and flesh of creatures, they live
on life itself, the force and essence of being.

One of their kind has come to me, and fed.
Before each dawn he will have come and gone again,
again and forever until my last breathing.
It is a slow death he brings; he is barely
existent, paper-thin. He will be at it for months,
pin-prick and red-dot scab so quickly gone,
I barely notice. He grows more solid each night.

My friends are little help. They are being finished off.
The vampire's minions have formed a gang: red-
hatted criminals in sports attire and fast cars.
Each victim is reduced to just a pile of bones,
so that I will be left alone for his stalking.
He turns the corner — I dash inside a doorway,
an empty apartment or untenanted warehouse.
The moment I reach its back-door egress, I find
him standing there, pale as an opossum.
He wags his finger in admonition: no exit
exists except I will find him already there.

On the dread night of the Winter Solstice I die,
and on the next morn he will assume a human form —
my youthful twin, solid and mirror-bright.
He will live out the life he stole from me.
His henchmen will be no encumbrance to his plan:
having devoured everyone I know, to the bone,
they will turn cannibal and consume each other.
Only my evil twin will be inheritor
of the desolate carnage of my existence.

On the dread night of the Winter Solstice I die,
unless there be other immortals who hate
that crisped, crawling parasite enough
to rise from Tartarus to put him down.
Where is the hell-mouth, then? How to descend
into the darkness where evil hates itself
enough to foment a war of monsters
against a great and ancient foe? Old books I seek,
the magic alchemical lore of my childhood,
a gateway talisman, the key that Solomon
and Dee and the other necromancers passed on.
The stone Eleggua winks at me as I incant,
Opener of Doorways, lead the way! Hecate,
scorn not the call of one who is not a woman!
Ye Hundred-Handed slayers, lend me but one hand!

I am not lamb, I am not sacrificial ox.
A vampire should be no more than a mosquito
to my larger and more expansive new self.
I shall return from the onyx night of Hell
with bat-bane and wolf-bane and Gorgon shield,
and with the one sword that will open him
and free a thousand souls' life-force into the cosmos.

Vampire, stalk not a sorcerer!

Rev 5/2/2019
[The first draft, written in one pass upon awaking from a dream, had some irregular lines. The revisions cast this into a mixture of blank verse and 12-syllable lines.]

The Sarah Helen Whitman Book is Now Available

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe’s posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916. As critic, she was a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson, yet none of her literary essays other than her defense of Poe have ever appeared in book form. She and her friend Margaret Fuller are credited with being the first American women literary critics.This volume presents Whitman’s literary essays with more than 500 annotations and notes, tracing her literary sources and allusions, and revealing the remarkable breadth of her readings in literature, philosophy, history, and science. Brett Rutherford’s biographical essay is rich in revelations about Whitman’s time and place, her family history, and her muted career as poet, essayist, and den mother to artists and writers. Exploding the standard view of her as the secluded “literary widow,” we can now perceive her as a literary radical pushing against a conservative milieu; a suffragist and abolitionist who dabbled in séances; and a devotee of the New England Transcendentalists and the German Idealists who inspired them.The complete text of Edgar Poe and His Critics presented here, includes the opposing texts by Rufus Griswold, whose libels provoked her landmark defense of Poe’s writing and character. This annotated version identifies all the contemporary press reviews and books Whitman read and critiqued, making it indispensible for students of Edgar Allan Poe.The selected poems in this volume include the hyper-Romantic traversal of rival mythologies in “Hours of Life,” her most ambitious work; her poems to and about Edgar Allan Poe; sensitive and atmospheric nature portrayals; a defense of the then-reviled art of the drama; a love poem from Proserpine to Pluto; an occasional poem about Rhode Island penned in the after-shadow of the Dorr Rebellion; and translations from French and German poets, most notably the most famous of all European ghost ballads, Bürger’s “Leonora.” Whitman’s allusions and unattributed quotations from other poets are all annotated, making this book a must for scholars and students.

Susanna Rich's Book Now Available

Susanna Rich's Beware the House book-ends a wide-ranging collection of life story-poems between two Gothic, haunted houses, the first a surreal nightmare; the second, the mock-Gothic harpsichord-punctuated world of TV’s The Addams Family. Unease, discomfort, and pain belong between two haunted places (confused birth and sardonic death), and Rich shares deeply personal accounts of her Hungarian-immigrant grandmother, obsessed in old age with Franz Liszt as an imaginary lover; and a disintegrating mother in the throes of dementia. At the center of the book are poems like glass shards of modern living, a keen and concise language palette turning the everyday into the extraordinary. Like a gypsy dance, these poems careen off common experiences — the grandmother’s kitchen, the captive butterfly, a rebellion of trees, the driven car and the rubbernecked accident. And there are villains: the predatory boor repulsed, the unteachable student lesson-taught, the empty soul of the CEO laid bare, the bad president as piñata, the lecherous poetry professor, the restless Dybbuk.

At First Sight

When people who read too many books are smitten, this is what you get.

AT FIRST SIGHT

by Brett Rutherford

You are my Ring of Power,
The hurled strength of Thor's hammer,
The Chalice, Excalibur,
Swan-Knight, archangel bright,
Siegfried awash in the Magic Fire,
Tristan, The Green Man,
The last Mohican at the wood's edge,
Golden-fleeced Jason, Perseus fleet
winged down with blade and polished shield.

And as for me, I am just a poet,

the sum of all the dreamers' words I read
and marked as my rude guide and talismen.
I was called Edmond Dantès once,
betrayed alike by friend and lover
until I became rich and vengeful.
I was Nemo at the helm of The Nautilus,
unperturbed by personal passions,
implacable enemy of unjust nations.
I was stern Morbius on far Altair
weighing the wisdom of the ancient Krell,
withholding love for the more-than-human.
Paul Verlaine was I once — three times
I regarded the young Rimbaud
through the clouded cafe window
and I walked away and returned
and I walked away and returned
before I dared introduce myself.
Forlorn I walked to a London's dawning,
fortune and reputation spent,
betrayed by Bosie, to my prison cell.
With mates I wept for slain Sarpedon,
and on the other side of the battle,
beat my shield for Achaean Patroklus.
These hands for Emperor Hadrian carved
the first immortal marble Antinous.
I despaired of all love at the organ
I played beneath the Paris Opera.

I was the avatar of solitude.

Why does it shatter now in a breath,

one head-to-toe embrace reducing me
to volt, amp, and constituent atoms?

You are my Ring of Power,

The hurled strength of Thor's hammer,
The Chalice, Excalibur,
Swan-Knight, archangel bright.
Siegfried awash in Magic Fire,
Tristan, The Green Man,
The last Mohican at the wood's edge,
Golden-fleeced Jason, Perseus fleet
winged down with blade and polished shield.

April 3, 2019, rev May 2, 2019

What Men Are Like

by Brett Rutherford

All men are like that, you know,
defensive and brave for honor's sake,
proud of their whiskered privilege,
lord of domains so clearly marked
with the smell of themselves.
They bite the back of your neck
as if they really meant to stay,
arched like that, in the impossible pose
of thrust and domination.

It is not true,
though he fight hordes to assert it,
that you are his sole affinity.
Come night, the moon sees what he is,
lost mariner in search of isles,
driven by lunar gravity
to them, those aching Others lined
on the gap-toothed fences of night.
Sirens in alleyways, dark eyes
on the brows of garbage cans—
for him, adventure is everywhere.

All men, when such a lure
compels them to go, become
what all men ever are:
arch-back, puffy-tailed tomcats.

To Cyrnus

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from the Greek of Theognis

My wings shall be the ones you use to fly
in passage over boundless sea and earth;
you’ll hear your name adorning many lips —
a wished-for celebrant at banquet mirth
when youths in loveliness shall bid you sound
again your flute’s melodious breath — my wings,
when you plunge darkling underground
into the melancholy house of death,
shall keep your honor bright, unperishing,
fit for undying fame in your name’s breath.
You shall be the only one of your name
to rise above the seas and shores of Greece,
sweeping from isle to isle the rocky main,
needless of horse at last, effortlessly
drawn by Muses in their violet crowns.
Thus men to come, if they still sing (or earth
and sun abide!) shall know and cherish you
because I loved and kept these letters safe.
Yes, these are my wings you fly upon.

But what is left to me, when I give you to all?
Scorned by your beauty, I burn and fall!

—Revised 2003, 2019

Life Without Siegfried

     Thoughts many years ago while hearing Georg Solti
     and The Chicago Symphony perform Act III
     Of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in concert

1
Here walks young Siegfried by the Rhine,
armed with a Ring the old gods lost,
curled in a fist, that ancient gold,
its sun-gut power crushed to grams
of portable might.
This hero, half-awake,
does not yet know himself.
He has lived among bears and evil dwarfs.
He knows not what power means,
nor in his brazen youth believes
the Rheingold curse’s warning.
As the nixies taunt him, he almost hurls
the thing into the river — let them have it;
it’s neither good for food or fighting —
but he yields instead, self-irked
to danger’s lure — his strong arms
enjoy a good battle. He savors fear
as though the its loss would soften him.
He will keep the Ring, to see what happens.

Already you are drugged, young man:
the Tarnhelm poison pours mercury
across your eyes, blinds you to envy
and to those who tread along behind you.
You love the hunt, the running ardent life;
sun-gilded trinkets are nothing to you
since you eat from the nut-trees and hunt-fire.
You are proud of your strength, your certitude 
oblivious to oaths of greed and lust,
the lure of pleasure the ends with knife-thrust.

As music soars, some listeners both hear
and see. Others have obsidian, dead eyes,
inverted smiles frozen in Republican hauteur,
Mrs. and Mr. Gibichung in furs and wingtips.
She has done nothing to harm anyone.
He has perhaps done a great deal to a great many.
The thin and tender line between cynic 
and murderer: one says no heroes live;
the others makes sure all heroes are killed.

This opera is not for its audience. It dwells
in a realm of ideas, forms crystallized
in words sung, spun upon leitmotivs
that make all words much more than their sum. 
Siegfried, you do not know
you are being played through, lived through,
a thousands voyeurs and auditors engaged
in your triumph and love and loss.

At the last, pathetic youth,
when your eyes are cleansed by a traitorous cup, 
when you at last remember everything,
you see how Love and Art are yours,
how you were tricked into giving them away
to fools; the Love you awakened
sent to warm the glutton crowds,
Brunnhilde cast to Mrs and Mr Gibichung,
never to grace your own barren hearth.


Then at the surge, when wings of worth
flap with your just demand,
you are just as suddenly slain.
Your terminus erupts in raven wings
and the All-Father who could have saved you
does nothing. One funeral beat
will serve for all. Everything must fall.

2
Now proud Brunnhilde,

the spiteful demi-goddess, comes,
armed with her timeless grace.
Whom have you killed? she asks
He brought the sun to your side,
you heard his songs, took me,
his freely given gift, in vain.
Come, light the pyre, indeed!
Burn all the souls in whom the hero died,
see if the withering youth in your breast
falls too, like his, when the world
envelops darkness for an age.
His loss has cost you me:
I’ll be no muse for coward bards.
All art and song I strip from you.
Birds even shall be dumb.
Life without Siegfried
must teach you what you have lost.

There burns the maiden Art:
museums blaze, books fall
as leaves, a flaming trumpet
melts, and in the wake
no hearth on earth shall glow again.

The floods of time and folly
bear off the Ring, while gods
who thought themselves undying
turn to dust in an eye-blink.
Now humankind will worship
a wimp’s god, a bloody thorn,
a bleating lamb, a sigil.

Go to the forest black, go where
no church steeple blights horizon.
Stand there, and on a breeze you hear
Brunnhilde’s hymn
changelessly re-sung:
to have lived, or died,
in the love of the human best
is great, and answerless.

[Revised May 2019]

Moving Day

by Brett Rutherford

Sometimes it takes a farewell
to get the earth to yield its promises.
Say an adieu to barren trees,
pack your belongings up in trunks
and packages — and then it starts.
A house in a better neighborhood
no sooner leased than a sun
rekindles every root with nascent spring —

the pigeons hop in mating dance
as if their talons burned from it;
squirrels unfold their nests of leaves
and clamber down to forage seeds;
and through the vast transparency
of paths I see again
the smooth white legs of runners
outdistancing the Spring.

And yet it’s always so.
I move to a place because I think
I will love it, but then I know
I am mistaken. Trees fall,
friends die, the loved do not
love back sufficiently.
I choose a new place because I think
I will love it, but then I know
that age and entropy are the same
everywhere. Too-many-times
moved ends in plain-sight invisibility.
This time it may be the end of me.

Look at those crocuses, those gold-
tipped stalks intent on daffodiling!
Witch-hazel, forsythia, cornelian cherry
teasing with early blossoms!
Windows thrown open, faces
beautiful to behold regard me.

A passing cars’s boom stereo
plays Mahler’s Second Symphony
as it dopplers on by. But here it is:
the moving truck arrives. Boxes
encase my every breathing word.
The books have gone to sleep,
all nestled dark with their brethren.
The kitchen is disassembled,
recipes entombed, spices sealed up
in their canopic jars. The pots
and pans are free to clatter
as the truck weaves and sways.

Why is the old place so beautiful now?
It is always thus:
When Love must yield
to parting words, she
turns her fairest cheek to kiss.

[Revised May 2019].

The Return of Richard Nixon

by Brett Rutherford

Confront them. Wing them away
in a one-way helicopter.

Damn it if they don’t come back
like termites or carpenter ants!

After a “decent interval”
the scoundrel Nixon came back.

He was on the best-seller list,
dashing about the talk shows,
a flutter of paper wings

on a rumpled dark suit.

He mingled among diplomats,
pressed hands of potentates,
showed teeth
behind the wrinkled dough
of a smile,

his head-on gaze at the cameras
said, “You see, I am not crazy.
I could have pushed that button.
But I didn’t.”
He fund-raised for candidates.
He stood in the reception line
and people told their children
as though they had met a Borgia,
some Pharaoh of Egypt,
or the dreaded Torquemada,
and lived to tell the tale.

The mirror
made no mistake.
The only reflection he had,
like an old cloth coat,
told him that skin was hard,
stayed where it was pulled,
that blood coagulated,
vision receded, friends
said they would call
but did not. He heard,
when he walked the golf course,
the mocking caddies parroting
“Not a crook. Not a crook.
Not a crook.”

Still, there was talk,
when he rose each day
and put on the requisite tie
and the American-flag pin.
Some said he wasn’t too old to serve.

The ink of the pardon was dry.
People just don’t remember.
They liked him in China.

I shuddered each time
I saw his face on the news,
and I called out in anger:
America,

don’t give a snake

a leg to stand on.

The Virgin Mary, After One View of the Kama Sutra

by Brett Rutherford

     after the painting by Campin

Flemish Maria has been up all night
reading the sweet books her lover procured,
unruly books with their naughty pictures
of men, and of maids, and of beasts and bees,
verdigris-colored lawns and turquoise skies.
Her nurse concealed them in sewing basket
past the ever-watchful eyes of parents.
She’s read all night, and studied positions
shown in an otherwise unreadable
quarto that Hans procured from India
(he would explain everything, he told her).


Now night’s dim candle has been extinguished
to barter for study in morning's rays.
Another book, the holy one, adorns
the tabletop, but hers, she must conceal
by veiling its more lurid reds in silk.
She dreams of a Bengali gazebo,
how two bronze-banded arms might hold her tight.
Two other men watch through a latticework,
chestnut-brown eyes upon her nakedness
while she pretends to be none the wiser:
O Eros, what a great game thou playest!

To catch the light she kneels; her elbow leans
on velvet cushioning, quite unaware
of how the in-folds and out-turns of gown
have lured two peeping, immaterial ghosts.
First, Gabriel: a beardless, mincing boy,
a wingèd beauty, but no match for her.
Heaven's eunuch flaps in like a sparrow
for a chat with the studious maiden.

He tells her what God has in mind. — “Why me?”
She can’t imagine why she was chosen.
Her protests will not help — though she is not
a virgin, really —  she has promised, sworn
to run off with her gentle ravisher.

“His name is Hans. He is not remotely
angelic. Odd teeth and a broken nose.
Why not choose that blond, Angelica, who
all but asks for it with her haughty name?”

But the angel babbles on about it —
his speech was all memorized, anyway.
He says she’ll be an unwitting mother,
warm hen to an invisible rooster,
then, a mother of one whose destiny
was written in stars and a prophecy.

“No, no,” she says, “I want no part of this,
and Hans would never forgive me; how could
he raise a son he did not recognize?”
Down comes Maria’s second visitor.
This one does not negotiate consent:
the ghost streaks down like molten mercury,
the tiny cross he rides like arrow-bolt
aimed straight at her womb, a battering ram.

This missile is Christ in miniature,
prefigured end already there in seed;
for her, a birth unasked-for, All-Mother-
of-Dead-Son her immortal agony.

Her eyes turn again to the outlawed book.
If she pretends she never heard the angel,
that nothing but a gadfly descended,
that a picture is worth a thousand words
of that indecipherable Sanksrit.
She sighs and thinks: That’s Hans on top, and me
on the bottom. Those chestnut eyes behind
the open latticework: watch over us!

Congress in Recess

Reform, like
Zeno’s arrow,
never comes:
before the halfway measure
must come the quarter measure,
before that,
the hemi-demi-semi measure,
before that, the intention,
never mind the will.


Lacking the single push of empathy,
the bowstring is unreleased;
indeed, it was never pulled —
the fat hand, weighted
with golden rings,
the bribed wrist,
the obligated arm
the withered loins
Medusa-paralyzed.


Fear no arrows from this
sclerotic body.
Congress is in recess.
Congress has been in recess
for longer than anyone
can count.

2009, rev. 2019, again May 2019.