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Because of	A giant	threatens	until it is stopped by
Atomic testing	mushroom omelet	Havana	at atomic explosion
An ancient curse	centipede	Pawtucket, R.I.	an enraged transvestite
A mad scientist	poodle	New York City	escaped pit bulls
Space aliens	Polish cleaning lady	the Empire State Building	a volcanic eruption
Corporate pollution	macramé	an all girls’ school	the U.S. Air Force
A Biblical prophecy	sewing machine	Kansas	Super Glue

Among the Put-Aways

“Sign for your medication,

your majesty,”

the intern drones.

Lazily, I sign my usual “Z,”
which no one knows is my protest,

a toppled “N”,
no use whatever
without the imperial seal
of the Bonapartes.

With a wink and a nod
he hands me the pill,
blocking the camera
as he takes it back.
Late night, in the parking lot
he will trade it for sex
with some homeless girl.

Later, the nurse comes.

“Flu shot!” she announces.

Ha! Don’t I know
it’s a lethal injection?

Promptly, I strangle her.
I practice Lon Chaney faces
for the cameras
until the orderlies come.

Again they want
a signature. I shake
my head “No” this time.
My friend the intern says,
“Let’s double his meds,”
wink-wink, nod-nod.
And as for the nurse,
just so they will not
get in trouble, they throw
her body down
the nearest air shaft.

Out on the grounds, where
all of us exercise
amid the topiary shrubs,
I am pursued
by a hillbilly zombie,
pitchfork thrust through
his back, four tines
protruding. “I like you,”
he says, “I like you.”

I do my best
at my levitation act
to avoid him. I float
just over the topiary tops

and sing in my best baritone
Over the Rainbow,
trail off after blue-birds
though no one knows anymore
what kind of thing a bird was.

Cold days, I am allowed
a corridor walk
which takes me past
the dispensary.
Renfield, the pharmacist,
shows only head to navel
at the dutch door.
“Don’t worry,” he cackles,
for nothing here is real.”
This too, I know,
is a form of medication,
but I have studied hard
at epistemology,
“No!” I snap back,
“Here, everything is real,
in the pineal’s basement.”

Next day, in the shrubbery,
the undead bumpkin
comes at me again.
I know if he gets
on top of me, the blades
of the pitchfork
will go right through me
and we’d be stuck that way
forever like two bad dogs.

That was before
the men who guard us
ran off to take pot-shots
at the invading raccoons,
and just before
the howling rainstorm
that lifted the roof away
to the shouted curses
of the regional chief.

I mark this all down
since I must never forget
I was a writer,
even a trained journalist,
before all this started.
Half of the drooling mad here
were college professors.

Today the green-skinned
zombie has got rid
of his pitchfork.
I help him un-do
his coveralls. His wounds

will heal quickly
since after all,
and like the millions
of his kind out there,
he’s never really going to die.

I’ve decided I like him, too.

He looks a bit
like Donovan,
the folk-singer,
and as for that
“eating brains” nonsense,
not to worry, he says,
he is firmly vegan.

We are planning our escape.
Whether the madhouse outside
is worse that the madhouse in,
we shall have to see.

Water Sprite (Providence)

Who are you, Water Sprite of the Seekonk? Who made you, this full moon night of lilacs, like spring itself a-burst, made you leap from the bulrushes of the park lagoon, your bare shoulders wet from the limpid waters, your long hair sun-gold (bleached white in lunary light, but sun-gold nonetheless!)?

Who made you so irresistibly beautiful. your visage the sculpted dream of surrender, your eyes the blue of hyacinth, of lapus lazuli?

As I rode by on my bicycle at midnight, who made you run naked to greet me, then leap into a clutch of chameleon trees?

Who made your fleeing soundless, as your bare feet sought stealth of moss?

Who, as I followed, bicycle laid flat on the clover grass and forgotten, made shards of you dissolve, in dapple of moonlight, in fall of blossom, uncurling fern and peeping mushroom?

Who made your soft voice beckon me, leading me deeper in woods. Circling, to come at you above and behind the lagoon edge, I came confounded to a rock at the other edge of the pool?

Was it your voice that whispered, as ripples subsided from a sinking point:

Follow me if you dare. I can be yours: mad angel of your destiny. Chase me forever – but I will always elude you — always escape to the other surface of water, of mirrors. Yours and not yours at the same moment, I will run through your hands like mercury.

I wait. Nothing rises to the surface to breathe. No bubble breaks the glass sheen of mirrored water. The night sky no longer wavers. The moon above, and the moon reflected, are equally still.

I ride home slowly, inhale the languor of cherry, the braggart bloom of magnolia, the luxury of lilacs. Who could resist this moon, this Dionysian spring? It draws us, real and unreal, mortal and mythical, quickens the water to form you, draws your spirit to my substance, my solitude to your incompleteness.

Were you some runaway, an escapee from the nearby asylum? A teen boy in moon-madness, seized by a sudden urge to plunge naked into the willow-fringed water? Or were you truly spectral, Ariel’s cousin?

Shall I return to find you some other spring first-night? Or shall you seek me out, coalescing from rainstorm? Will you press through my window-screen, cooling my night-heat with your smooth pale skin? Will you caress me with the patient ardor of ocean, the murmur of brooks in my ear? Will I taste dew on your lips?  And will you one day, as we stand at lake’s edge, pull me downward, arms strong as river currents?

Weeks pass. I keep seeing you in others, but others are not you. No one possesses the lilac scent of your impossible hair. No sight matches the clear blue window of your eyes above me.

Theology 101

My proof

that religion

is unnatural:

if you put a bishop’s hat on a dog,

it will do everything

within its power

to remove it.

While it wears the hat,

no other dog

will have anything

to do with it.

The Unreliable Autumn (Anniversarius 47 from the Book of Autumn)

It doesn't want to be Fall.
Not one bit of the horizon
has even a tinge of red or yellow.
The sickly sycamores, admittedly,
have gone into their crisping act,
and there's a kind of wilted edge
to random leaves at arm's reach.
Yet pole-melt and hurricane,
bird and bug absence foretell
that something awful
is out there —

the snow will come unannounced
before the pumpkin harvest.
I will awaken to its glare
that doubles the sun's intensity
on kitchen wall, draw up
the bedroom shade to see its full
white blanket wink in the parking lot,
where an acquisitive wind
will make drifts of it.

There are no clear edges any more.
No respect for solstice, equinox.
Some god of caloric anger rips skeins
off icebergs and denudes Greenlandia.
Summer goes south to pout
and meditate, while here up north,
instead of an apple- and pie-harvest,
we will shudder in all enveloping Siberia.

But nature has its seductions.
When all seems at its worst, the crocuses
line up with little flags, freezing
their delicate asses off, and you,
despite all your blizzards,
will fall for it.

With drops and heaves
and thunderings, you
will give us spring.

To the Shah, King of Kings

     adapted from Hafiz, via Emerson

For whom does great Arcturus raise
his shining spear each eve and morn?
For thee, great Shah, thy foes he hunts,
and when they are no longer fair,
thy fawning courtiers he slays!

The Periodic Table: Hydrogen

You are the First One.
Once, your unity
was the Only Thing.

A hot blast of protons,
sperm stuff of the cosmos,
jostling your jillion
identical twins, up, down,
in a vibrant scream
of creative urges,
partnering in ions,

H dating H
(no law against it),

H2 self-bonding,
converging in gas clouds,
gobbling stray neutrons,
dreaming of empire
yet eluding all,

stuff of the Ether,
the Bifrost stream
between galaxies,
ball lightning
and balloon flight,

ever at the edge
of an explosion
if oxygen is near,

holding your
secret of secrets dear:
the self-annihilating
fusion, the flame

of masturbation

at the heart of stars.

Without you, nothing;
with you, more questions
than ever answers,
light as a whisper,
      Hydrogen.

--2015, rev 2019

Son of Dracula (From the Book of Autumn)

I was the pale boy with spindly arms, the undernourished bookworm dressed in baggy hand-me-downs (plaid shirts my father wouldn’t wear, cut down and sewn by my mother), old shoes in tatters, squinting all day for need of glasses that no one would buy.

At nine, at last, they told me I could cross the line to the adult part of the library, those dusty classic shelves which no one ever seemed to touch.

I raced down the aisles, to G for Goethe and Faust.

I reached up for Frankenstein at Shelley, Mary (not pausing at Percy Bysshe!). 

And then I trembled at lower S to find my most desired, most dreamt-of — Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Dracula! His doomed guest! The vampire brides! His long, slow spider-plot of coming to England to drain its aristocratic blood! His power over wolves and bats and vermin! To be himself a bat, or a cloud of mist! To sleep all through the classroom day!

This was the door to years of dreams, and waking dreams of dreams. I lay there nights, the air from an open window chilling me, waiting for the bat, the creeping mist, the leaping wolf, the caped, lean stranger.

Lulled by the lap of curtains, the false sharp scuttle of scraping leaves, I knew the night as the dead must know it, waiting in caskets, dressed in opera-house clothes that no one living could afford to wear.

But I was not on London! Not even close! The American river town of blackened steeples, vile taverns and shingled miseries had no appeal to Dracula. Why would he come when we could offer no castle, no Carfax Abbey, no teeming streets from which to pluck a victim?

My life — it seemed so unimportant then — lay waiting for its sudden terminus, its sleep and summoning to an Undead sundown. How grand it would have been to rise as the adopted son of Dracula!

I saw it all: how no one would come to my grave to see my casket covered with loam. My mother and her loutish husband would drink the day away at the Moose Club; my brother would sell my books to buy new baseball cards; my teachers’ minds slate clean forgetting me as they seemed to forget all who passed beneath and out their teaching. (Latin I would miss, but would Latin miss me?)

No one would hear the summoning as my new father called me: Nosferatu! Arise! Arise! Nosferatu!

And I would rise, slide out of soil like a snake from its hollow. 

He would touch my torn throat. 

The wound would vanish. 

He would teach me the art of flight, the rules of the hunt, the secret of survival.

I would not linger in this awful town for long. One friend, perhaps, I’d make into a pale companion, another my slave, to serve my daytime needs (guarding my coffin, disposing of blood-drained bodies) — what were friends for, anyway?

As for the rest of this forsaken hive of humankind, I wouldn’t deign to drink its blood, the dregs of Europe.

We would move on to the cities. To Pittsburgh first, of course, our mist and bat-flight unnoticed in its steel-mill choke-smoke. The pale aristocrat and his thin son attending the Opera, the Symphony, mingling at Charity Balls, Robin to his Batman, cape shadowing cape, fang for fang his equal soon at choosing whose life deserved abbreviation.

A fine house we’d have (one of several hideouts), a private crypt below, with the best marbles, the finest silk, mahogany, brass for the coffin fittings. Our Undead mansion above filled to the brim with books and music.

I waited, I waited — but he never arrived.

At fifteen, I had a night-long nosebleed, as though my Undead half had bitten me, drinking from within. I woke in white of hospital bed, my veins refreshed with the hot blood of strangers. I had not been awake to enjoy it! I would never even know from whom it came.

Tombstones gleamed across the hill, lit up all night in hellish red from the never-sleeping iron furnaces. Leaves danced before the ward-room windows, blew out and up to a vampire moon. I watched it turn from copper to crimson, its bloating fall to treeline, its deliberate feeding on corpuscles of oak and maple, one baleful eye unblinking.

A nurse brought in a tiny radio. One hour a night of symphony was all the beauty this city could endure — I held it close to my ear, heard Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony: the gallows march, the artist’s Undead resurrection amid the Witches’ Sabbath — my resurrection.

I asked for paper. The pen leaped forth and suddenly I knew that I had been transformed. I was a being of Night now. I was Undead since all around me were Unalive.

I had turned the sounds of Berlioz's Witches Sabbath into words, and in the words, the images of night winds, witch sarabandes, wizard orgies, and a hilltop of animal-demon-human frenzy.

The Vampire Father never had to come. I was my own father, self-made from death's precipice.

I saw now what they could not see, walked realms of night and solitude where law and rule and custom crumbled. I was a poet. I would feed on Beauty for blood, I would make wings of words, I would shun the Cross of complacency. 

A cape would trail behind me always.

Letters on a Rock Outcrop

Full moon shines down,

an amber glow
upon a wind-worn outcrop.

Three shapes with barely
a shadow form letters:
an “S” made up of a skull,
a torn sarape, two femurs
and some gnawed-off toes.

Inside it a smaller “S”,
a same-size skull
with horn-rimmed
spectacles, a T-shirt
with a star inside a circle,
two tiny femurs,
and a blur of wind-torn
white shoelaces.

A third, and even smaller
“S” is nestled there,
and when the night chill ends,
it separates itself,
an “S” and then another
“S” until it is an undulant line
off to the horizon.

The desert snake knows where
to find the water.

Maria from Chimaltenango
did not; her son
Pablito, did not.

The moon spoke
neither K’iche nor Spanish;
the American sun
killed them.

The Milwaukee Intervention (A Verse Play)

A verse play in one scene by Brett Rutherford

Copyright © by Brett Rutherford

All Rights Reserved

Scene: Office of a shipping company. Wooden desk, old army green file cabinets, nautical maps. A window looking out over docks with a partial view of several freighters or container ships. A door backstage with glass windows, smudged..

Mrs. Caruso, early 70s, white hair in disarray, over-decorated with gaudy jewelry, wearing no nonsense work boots and a belt with a heavy key chain hanging from it. She has an old fashioned rotary phone, and a short-wave radio set with a microphone and headphones. A computer setup with an old monochrome green screen, wires and cables dangling from it.

MRS. CARUSO (puts on headset, dials in):

Arrigo, you there?  (Pause) Don’t "over" me, just talk.

I need to know when you get to that place,
you know, the Milwaukee location. Yeah,
just call me back when you’re near. I gave you,
you know, the address and all that. Bye now.

Her daughter Irene, in a red coat, passes by the window and reaches the door. She puts her face to the glass to look inside.

IRENE

Mom, is that you in there?

Mrs Caruso takes off the headset and turns toward the door.

MRS CARUSO

                                                   Who else but me?
Come on in, it’s never locked, anyway.
(Who would be crazy enough to rob us?)

They hug, then Mrs. Caruso pushes her back to inspect her daughter’s face.

MRS. CARUSO

You’re looking better. You went to that place
I told you about? (Irene nods). Good makeup helps
cover up those bruises, and all the right
vitamins will keep you in fighting form.
What’s that below your eye?

IRENE

Nothing, mom. He —

MRS. CARUSO

                                 Did it again, didn’t he?
Don’t tell me he hit you after all that,
I mean with him in those crutches and all?

IRENE

I promised not to get you involved, mom.
I thought it was his last attempt.

MRS. CARUSO

                                                            Just why
would a man who got himself beaten so
he was within an inch of his life, and
had to have you feed him like a baby —
who would he go and do that?

IRENE

                                                          Kielbasa.

CARUSO

What the hell is kielbasa?

IRENE

                                               It’s sausage,
mom, that disgusting red Polish sausage.
It’s full of gristle and fat and God knows
what else, and it is so tough you just know
you’re eating something the dog would refuse.
He always wants it on Friday. I gag
when I see it. I just can’t cook the stuff.
So I said, No, not this week, not ever.

MRS. CARUSO

And so he punched you in the eye again?

IRENE

It was worse. He took the whole crutch
and swung it wide. I ducked, but it got me.
That rubber thing on the end, it  just swiped
by my face and all but knocked me over.
I didn’t see the black eye till later.
That was three days ago. It’s almost healed.

MRS CARUSO

I thought as much. I had my eye on him
from the morning he left the hospital.
I thought you’d be here Sunday. I worried
when you didn’t call yesterday. I knew
you’d need a little more – intervention.
I don’t know why you married that Pollock
bastard anyway.

IRENE

                                    You liked him at first.

MRS. CARUSO

He was going to treat my daughter well,
like a princess, he said, and him being
all big and blond like that, so who was I
to doubt he would take care of you? The fool!

IRENE

It was all good until he lost his job.

MRS. CARUSO

That’s what they all say. The evil they do
at the office, they do to someone else.
But watch out when they bring the troubles home!

(Looks at the short-wave radio).

Hold on, that’s Arrigo. (into mike) Caruso here.
What’s your position, Arrigo? (to Irene). Our barge,
the Star of the Sea, she’s off past San Juan. (Listens).
Call me when you get on the satellite.
Over and out.

IRENE

                           I don’t know how you manage
to keep Dad’s business going.

MRS. CARUSO

                                                       You mean
me being a woman and all? How dare
this Italo-American widow,
the one woman who everyone expects
to spend the rest of her life in black skirts,
how dare I march in and take it over,
the Caruso Barge and Freight Line, just me,
the woman who knows nothing? On day one,
a captain came in and lifted my skirt.
He left with two fingers broken, and hell
to pay at home to explain his bruises.

IRENE

You’re tough, mom. No doubt about it.

MRS. CARUSO

So then your man took off without a word?

IRENE (surprised)

How did you know that?

MRS. CARUSO

                                                 That’s why you’re here.

IRENE

Well, he’s gone, and someone has stolen
his Harley, right from the garage. I mean,
he wasn’t riding off on those crutches.
We’ve such a bad run with burglaries, mom,
I didn’t know what to think.

MRS CARUSO

                                                 Burglaries?
Oh, you mean the gun collection? That was
a year ago, wasn’t it? After he
threatened you with that AR-15?

IRENE

                                                 Yes,
right after you intervened –and sent that priest.

MRS. CARUSO

Not a priest.

IRENE

              Well, he looked like a priest,
or a seminary student, all dressed
in black, and as he spoke so quietly
I couldn’t make out what he said to Tad,
but I know he wound up kneeling, and made
a promise I would never be unsafe.
It was the next day we went to South Beach,
and came back and found the whole collection
was gone, cleaned out to the last bullet.

MRS. CARUSO

                                                                       Ha!
Just like magic. I think he sold them all,
and he was just too ashamed to tell you.

IRENE

I don’t know, mom. He didn’t say a word.
He never called police since half the guns
were illegal anyway.

MRS. CARUSO

                                        Good riddance.
A lot of wives would like to have such luck,
to see their husband’s greedy hobbies burgled.

(Phone rings)

Hold on. (Into phone.) Enrico, that you? What gives?
The damn Liberians won’t accept it?
What’s wrong with a load of fly ash and all
that damn construction waste? What do they know
about the asbestos? A dump is a dump.
(to Irene). Sorry dear, just a little business.

(into phone). Look, no one over here will take the stuff.
The Africans are too good for us, eh?
Guess you’ll just have to bring it all back home.
Or, there’s always the nearest trench. Look on
the charts, and mind you don’t spill anything.
(Pauses). I didn’t say that. You didn’t hear that.

(Hangs up. Sighs). Irene, my dear, you are so innocent.
You have no idea what I do here
to keep our family and boats afloat.

So anyway, your darling Tad is gone.

IRENE

Where would he go? He can’t walk?

MRS. CARUSO

                                                              Odds are good
he’s in some dive, getting his kielbasa up
with some blond-haired lady, the kind, you know,
who do and say anything by the hour.

IRENE

Mom, no, don’t be so cruel. I just want him
found. I want to know he’s safe.

MRS. CARUSO

                                                            You want what?
Already, he had three chances. The first,
was when he hit you. I made him promise,
and he swore on his own mother’s bones, swore
he would never raise his hand against you.
And then the second time, gun in your face,
the threat against you “and all your kind,”
“and all your kind,” let’s not forget that one.

And then he hit you yet again, too drunk,
he said, to remember clearly. That’s right
before he had his Harley turn over
and people he didn’t see broke his legs.
You don’t get a fourth chance with Carusos.

IRENE

But he is missing, mom! I’ve been calling —

MRS. CARUSO

Calling whom? It’s not even three days yet —

IRENE

Emergency rooms! I just keep asking
if a man on crutches came in confused
and maybe had amnesia, you know?
I tried the police. They wouldn’t listen.

MRS. CARUSO

Irene, you know how we and the police —

IRENE

I know, mom, I know. But I worry so.

MRS CARUSO
Poor dear. Give mom a hug. You have it bad.

(They embrace. Irene cries.)

I have reason … to believe … that your Tad
has left you once and for all.

IRENE (pulling away)

                                             That can’t be.

MRS. CARUSO

I’ve had him watched. I look out for my own.
He left Sunday … for Milwaukee.

IRENE

                                                          Milwaukee?
Who knows anyone in — where? — Milwaukee?

MRS CARUSO

Lots of Polish folk there. He can find work.
He’ll get a fake ID so no one can find him.

IRENE

But Tad is my husband. We are married.

MRS CARUSO

Admit it, Irene. You came to me for help.
Just the way you would have turned to your Dad.
You know we always … solve …. problems. That’s what
family is for. You ask, and action —

IRENE (stepping away)
You knew he was gone … you didn’t tell me?

MRS. CARUSO

Irene, It’s for the best to let him go.

(Radio call comes in.)

Hold on, Irene. … Caruso here, ten four. (Pause)

You’re in position, good? Let’s just confirm:
that’s nineteen – forty two – forty nine North,
sixty-seven ---eighteen --- thirty nine West.

(Pauses. Irene starts to walk back to the door.)

(to Irene) Don’t you dare leave! Don’t turn your back on me,
young lady. You asked for help!

IRENE

                                                                  I did not ask!

MRS CARUSO

You didn’t have to ask in words. I saw
your face the day after he threatened you.
I saw your father’s pride in those cheekbones.

(Talking into microphone). 

That’s it, Arrigo. Call down and tell them
to drop their cargo. Tie them together.
Any other ships in sight?  Nothing – that’s good.
See you guys back in Miami. Love ya’!

(Sighs, then turns to face Irene. It is an emotional stand-off. 

Each waits for the other to speak first. Irene finally bows her head, walks over and takes a seat).

IRENE

What am I supposed to do, mom?

MRS. CARUSO

                                                               Just let
the bastard go, Irene. He was rotten.

IRENE

I just can’t. I could have done it, my way,
my time, my breaking point. But not this way,
him backing off to make me unhappy,
with nothing ever resolved.

MRS CARUSO
                                                   You got no kids.
So what kind of man was that, anyway?

IRENE (standing)

I’ll go to Milwaukee. I will find Tad.

MRS CARUSO

You just don’t see it, do you? It’s all fixed.
I solved your problem. Your husband is gone.
Get on with your life. Go have some babies.
Hook up with a nice … young … Italian man.

IRENE

You will tell me where he is. Milwaukee,
where in Milwaukee?

MRS CARUSO (throwing up her hands)

I am your mother. I fix it for you,
and you are ungrateful. So listen now
and learn how we do things in this real world,
this world of ships that chug the world’s garbage.

Tad is in “The Milwaukee Depth.” Just now
he was tied to his damn motorcycle
and dumped into the Puerto Rico Trench —

IRENE (cries out) Mom, no!

MRS CARUSO

                                               Twenty-seven thousand feet deep.
Squashed like a bug at the bottom, you hear?
Squashed like a bug and never to come back
and never to hurt my little Irene!

IRENE
All along it’s been you behind it all,
You sent the priest who was no priest; you sent
the burglars who took his guns, and the thugs
who drove him off the road and broke his legs.
What are you? What am I? What have we done?

(Irene backs toward the door, looking at her mother in horror. She reaches the door, opens it from behind her without looking, and exits. She is seen running past the windows.

MRS. CARUSO (alone)

(Sighs, throws up her hands). What we do for family. No one knows.

The phone rings. 

Caruso here. Calm seas and prosperous voyage.

The sound of a freighter whistle.

FINIS

The Pumpkined Heart (An Experiment)

In my first year in New York, I longed for that small Pennsylvania college town with its mysterious lake and pioneer graveyard ...

Somewhere, the moon is red and cornstalks lean with the wind in plucked fields. Not in New York, city of bleached stone and desperate trees, is my long walk of haystacks, fog in ascent, not where traffic sings its sexless honking can anyone mark the dim-out of frogs, the dying-off of dragonfly wing-beats.

I am pulled up — I levitate, October-tugged, away from the rat-doomed isle of Hudson, clearing the water tanks and steeple-tops, held fast on course by Orion’s glimmer, the angry scorpion tail fast behind me. With leaves and dust I fly to my lake shore, to the pumpkined heart, the base and the root, the earth I touch as pole and battery.

I love this village, though it loves not me; remember it, though it erases me. I mark in my life, how I bear and remember  Octobers, and I know that a year is judged by how it dies in these treetops: if it is burned to cloud the eyes of men, or if it lies, burst red in its full regale, waiting for snow, and the worms and the spring, yes, to feed a new sun!

Earth, I am an ochre sheet of your leaves, leaves more frequent than men in my lines, leaves more fertile than mothers can be, leaves, red, yellow, ambitious, how you have crept! Leaves who have chilled my undraped lovers at night, leaves sharing graveyard solemn caress with my lips,  leaves recurring everywhere to say their red gossip, leaves for all I know returning again to this Fall,     to this place, still blushing to recount how lovers were spent in their bed, leaves forever spelling the name of lost love!

You names that rise to my lips on October nights, you sleep-thieving echoes of aspirant heart, rise from the sealed tomb of years, drag shroud, where no leaves chatter nor branches impede, dead, in the track of stalking remembrance — you  who wake me alone in my grave, grave bed to recall each passionate urge from green twig.  

Each, each and all have grown red, defiant in the drugged fall, denying parentage in terrible wind, nonetheless breaking free, falling to my fever in your high flame; red, then wet, moist in your somber dissent, then dry, then dead, then in my hand the brown dust that a seed should come to, a leaf forever spelling the name of lost love!

Autumn Elegy (An Experiment)

Written at Edinboro PA in middle of the Vietnam War ...

The snow has come. The swirling flakes self-immolate on hot maple grove, white-fringe the aging auburn oaks, a coin drop from winter into the glacial lake. (Cold comes so early here — September frost invades the harvesting and gives the roses heart attacks.) The boreal wind has taken up residence,  has seized the calendar in icy clench.

The hat I haven’t seen since spring comes down —I undertake a day-long search for hibernating gloves and boots. My scarf has stolen off — I know not where. The mouse, the gray one my cat keeps catching and letting go, darts to and fro on the kitchen floor — does he know the hard light’s reckoning? Does bone-deep chill at dawn embolden him this once for daylight foraging? (We have an arrangement on the winter’s supplies:  he comes out at night and he and I know full well that whatever is not locked is not wanted, fair game for a gray mouse.) He nudges a cast-off crust,  noses for crumbs, his whiskers italicizing the advent of hunger, his tail a question mark interrogating me about the wayward sun.

Alone in frost, I take my place at the lake, my solitude complete, my steps the first to break the pathway to the pebbled shore. I stand alone, until the rabbit peers out from the graveyard grass — twice now he’s been there among the mummied lilies, his eye, as mine, upon the never-placid waves.

The summer boats are gone. White ducks that waded here are huddled now beneath the bridge, far downstream. The other birds have packed their bags — they have left us their broken shells, their desolated nests, their songs a carbon copy of a twice-repeated tale.  

Lord Lepus, what do you know of impending ice? Do you suspect the cirrus-borne snow’s arrival? Will you find greens enough beneath the snow bank?

We turn our mutual ways — you to your warren amid the husks and roots and toppled gravestones — I must go to book and breakfast. I leave the trees, fond frame of my eye’s delight, putting behind me the cup of lake that always welcomes each sunrise. Soon now its eye will be blinded, a cataract reflecting sheet-white nothingness.

I walk through town, across the college grounds where last night’s wind’s caprice made here a pristine bed of snow — yet over there an untouched riot of maple on still-green lawn. The carillon tolls the beginning of the day; the students hurry, dumbfounded at virgin snow.

I am the only one to linger here. I stand  upon a carpet of red, soft, ancient leaves: some, some are green yet, they are still proud, they are fallen on the wings of their youth and they are going to pick up anytime now and fly back —

I am mourning for them, for them, for you, for my brothers who have fallen.