Icelandic Justice

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from the Old Norse

And he of you, one or the other
that shall rail against the settlement
of a dispute, or deny atonement made,
or break an oath he was bidden to swear:

Hunt him we shall, as we hunt the wolf,
to the far hills and the icy crevasse,
even to the mouth of Hel, wherever wolf
would flee, him we shall follow,
to the earth's last Christian church we hunt him,
even in the heathen place of offerings
we shall hunt and find him;

we shall seek him as far as fire burns,
to the last meadow where earth-grass greens,
to any place where sons their mother summon
to hearth-side, to the last mother's bearing
of the last son of her line we seek him,

at any place where any wanderer
kindles his lonely fire, we find him out,
to any sea that ships sail, to any isle
where the fugitive' shield shines
in a foreigner's battles, we know
his name and by his name we find him.

Can he find a place where no sun shines,
where no snow settles white on hillocks,
where waters lie flat with no fish-fin upon it,
where there is no shade or shard of fir
to give him shelter or kind kindling.

Oh, let him fly with a fair wind behind him.
Let him have winds of fame in his new-found name.
We shall find him out, as sure as sky turns,
as sure as thee earth lets us walk upon it
and not sink down to quicksand, as sure as wind
blows sails, and waters went to the sea,

as long as one mean churl casts seed
into the earth at ice-break,

as long as there is bread to eat and mead
to comfort our long-arm quest,
he shall not evade the Law!

No One Will Ever Believe You....

A woman refuses the advances of the most famous and powerful man in the land. And she pays the price ... she will always tell the truth, and no one will believe her. Barbara A. Holland, writing in 1976, uses the story of Trojan Cassandra to make a point about women's credibility, and men's hypocrisy.

CASSANDRA

by Barbara A. Holland

My ears burn. The lobes are swollen.
Last night two huge and numinous serpents 
were looping across my floor. The scrape 
of their coilings against the tiles awoke me. 
They struck, each at an earlobe. 
The pain in them almost blinds me. 

When I had made poultices 
to hold to my ears, they had gone. 
Were it not for 
the ache and the swelling, the throbbing
like a signaling drum, a code,              
                                             I would think that they had only 
been forms cast by moonlight 
and branches on the floor,
              but the cruelty of the bites in my ears 
has made it clear 
to me that they had surely been s
ent in revenge by the sun,
             Apollo — 
resentment at my rejection of him.

Apollo; creeping horror.  Who would believe it 
of the daily sun-blast at the heat of noon,
           of the cheer of the elderly,
           the healer, the oracle?

My head rings 
with a discord of voices, 
the song of spears on breastplates and shields, 

words peeling in conflict 
about a thousand absurdities. They are inside 
my skull and I may not shut them out 
or muffle them. 

They prize from inside my mouth 
for release, and I must let them go.

Warning of foreign ships, 
a gigantic wooden horse 
left as an offering on the beach 
for the gods, 
the womb within it
and its disastrous litter of soldiers, 
which I cannot believe. 

Apollo, 
               refusing to accept my rejection 
has made me appear 
both lunatic and traitor 
with his poison,
                            now gnawing 
into my shoulders and scorching 
the veins 
in a neck as taut as any bowstring. 

From the forthcoming Poet's Press book, Out of Avernus: The Exiled Priestess.

6th Edition of Whippoorwill Road Now Available!

This is the expanded sixth edition of Brett Rutherford's landmark poetry collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poetry. This extraordinary 420-page paperback contains all the poet's supernatural poems, including 12 major new poems added since the last edition, and revisions to eight of the earlier works. Praised by Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, these may be the best supernatural poems of our time. The writing ranks from the seriously Gothic through the downright hilarious, including Gorgons, Golems, Egyptian mummies, Lovecraftian horrors, vampires, werewolves, possessed sex toys and stuffed animals, and the personal recollections of Fritz, the hunchback assistant of Dr. Frankenstein. All of Rutherford's Lovecraft-related poems are collected in this volume -- more than 100 pages of Lovecraftian items including all the poems written for the annual ceremonies at HPL's gravesite in Providence. Other major new items in this collection include the long narrative poem “Mrs. Friedman’s Golem,” and accounts of Pittsburgh’s radioactive grave-walking specter, the most alarming bed-and-breakfast stay of all time, a secret mental ward full of Lovecraft fans, and a young girl’s lessons in witchcraft in ancient Corinth.
This is the 255^th publication of The Poet’s Press, under its Grim Reaper Books imprint.

Sixth edition, revised and expanded 2019. 414 pp., 6x9. ISBN 9781701296275 . $19.95.

New Today from The Poet's Press

JODY AZZOUNI. HEREAFTER LANDSCAPES.

As cheerful as Timon of Athens or Anacreon, philosopher-poet Jody Azzouni unleashes this cycle of aphoristic, terse and dark visions of the world after global warming, nuclear winter, pollution, mutation and plague have come and gone. There's no "rapture" to rescue us, just the hard light of a ruined world. Back in the Cold War, Bertrand Russell noted that the smartest thinkers were the most gloomy about the prospects for humankind, and this cycle inhabits that world of intellectual worry. And yet there is beauty in desolation, and every dystopian artwork, by depicting what might and must not come to pass, may serve as a warning. Hereafter Landscapes might be the butterfly that changes history by changing the hearts of a few — or it might be locked into a time capsule as a prime specimen of post-millennial gloom. However one takes this sombre and linguistically rich little book, it comes from a serious thinker, versed in myth, science and art. In keeping with the book's theme, we chose to decorate it with the paintings and engravings of the artist most associated with the terror of the Sublime: John Martin. Martin's vast murals terrified crowds in London, and his engravings of Paradise Lost and Biblical cataclysms gave nightmares to generations of Victorian schoolchildren.

When the first edition came out in 2010, it was selected as one of the six best chapbooks of that year by Presa magazine: "The most ambitious production in this round-up, complete with beautifully printed cover art and illustrations from the paintings and engravings of John Martin . . . The poetry has a prophetic quality that reminds us of the apocalyptic writings of William Blake. Azzouni also deals with the big themes, unafraid of directly engaging the spectre of potential environmental & nuclear disaster. His work is didactic, but not in a bad way, since the issues raised are the very issues of human meaning and survival."

New second edition October, 2019. This is the 256th publication of The Poet's Press.
56 pp., 8-1/2 x 7 inches, full color, $12.95 paperback.

Why I Do Not Employ Rhyme

A FEW WORDS ABOUT FORM

by Brett Rutherford
From Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems, Sixth edition 2019.

Early Gothic or supernatural poems were imitative of ballads, and employed rhyme, and ballad measures, most typically six or eight syllable lines. Rhyme was assumed to be the norm for this kind of writing. The German ghost ballads, and earlier English and Scottish ballads that inspired them, set the mold for the Gothic poem.

As a poet of the 20th and 21st centuries, and having learned the art in San Francisco and New York in the twilight of the Beat era, I completely break with fixed rhyme and fixed meters. In the poetry circles in which I worked and began my serious writing and publishing, such poems were objects of scorn. The occasional accidental rhyme was a delight, a final couplet was an accepted nod to Shakespeare, and a sonnet was respected, provided its rhymes were executed with great subtlety.

While I have studied the supernatural poem in English from its sources through the early 1900s, in my annotated editions of M.G. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder and my own succeeding volumes, Tales of Terror, and acknowledged those fine works in their contexts, I continue to be convinced that fixed meter and rhyme in English are anathema. Even when I adapt a rhyming poem from Russian or German or French, I do not employ rhyme in my own English version. 


Do not mistake what I do for “free verse.” Inspired by Shakespeare, Poe, Shelley, Whitman, and Jeffers in poetry, by Bradbury in prose, and by Romantic art and music, I seek to use every device in the poet’s arsenal even while avoiding the dreaded rhyme. My works range from short-line improvisations to longer works in blank verse or extensions thereof. Not every line is “poetic,” and indeed, in some poems, there is a prosaic “warming up,” like the recitative before an opera aria, before the rhapsodic passages take flight. The narrative poem is a more relaxed medium than the short lyric. 

Many poems have leaped to the page, all but fully-formed. These days I awaken from a vivid dream and go straight to pen and paper, sometimes writing completely-formed stanzas (this is not a boast but a description of the process). 

Readers will recognize my debts to my masters, and of these resemblances I am proud. I continue to experiment with longer lines that have a more “operatic” breath, and almost all my poems are intended to be read aloud. The quest, even amid terror, is for language to offer the sense of sudden inspiration, and to deliver the sublime.

Squanto's Wind (2019 revision)

Boston's John Hancock Tower, constructed in the 1970s, was one of the world's worst architectural disasters. The foundation undermined adjacent buildings, and ten thousand window panes began popping out and falling onto pedestrians below; and the whole building swayed sickeningly in the wind. In this poem I recount some of the building's disastrous details, and speculate about whether some angry Native American spirit might be getting even with Boston. I invoke Squanto, the first Native American to greet the arriving Puritans. By one of the most bizarre coincidences in all history, Squanto had previously been captured, enslaved, and gone to Europe and back, so that he was able to greet the arriving colonists with the words, "Welcome, Englishmen!"
I did a little digital art piece for this too, combining Squanto's portrait with the cursed tower.

This is a new 2019 revision of the poem for the sixth edition of Whippoorwill Road.

A ruffian wind
content till now to move
through barricades of steel
to tug of sea,
forgetful of forest and creek,
rears up at last,
howls No emphatically

at the Hancock tower,
a block as gray as greed,
lunging from bedrock to sky.

The primal No acquires more force,
plucks glass like seeds
from a ruptured grape.

The window panes explode —
a million shards
of architectural sneeze
scattered by gravity
to punctuate the streets
with gleaming arrowheads,
obsidian spears,
black tomahawks
of dispossession.

What Manitou is this
who shakes his fist
at the barons of finance?
Whatever happened to
“Welcome, Englishmen!”
(the first words spoken
by Native to Puritan)?

The engineers move in,
revise their blueprints
while covered walkways
protect pedestrians
from Hancock’s continued
defenestration.

Months pass, and yet
a lingering wind remains,
circling the sheltered walks,
lapping at plywood sheets,
a sourceless gale
that ruffles Bostonians

with its reiterated cry,
not on this land you don’t.

On really windy days
the whole tower sways
and workers turn green
from motion sickness.
Millions are spent
on a counter-sliding bed
of lubricated lead
to gyro the floor to apparent
stillness; millions more
are extracted in court
from the slap-suited builders,
for fifteen hundred tons
of diagonal braces,
all to stop
the whole ziggurat
from an inevitable topple, should
just one wind, at just one angle
twist everything
into a snarl of pretzeled girders.

Finally all ten thousand panes
are one by one, removed,
and one by one replaced.

Is Squanto satisfied
that the tower was sold,
that the new owners slid
to bankruptcy (at least
on paper), though bankers just ooze
from one debacle to another,
awarding themselves
baronial bonuses?

No! His feathered face frowns
on clouded-over days,
to the misery of golfers;
his never-tiring gusts divert
the errant baseball, ensuring
decades of home-game dejection.
Bicyclists knocked flat
have no idea what hit them,
and every discarded lottery ticket
flies up in a miniature whirlwind
to menace dog walkers with
inexplicable paper-cuts.

It will take more than
double-dug foundations,
and wind-tunnel-tested
new window panes,
to still these vectors of rage.

Token pow-wows at shopping malls
and suburban parks
do not fool old Squanto:
sharp-dealing and inhospitable,
Boston must pay!

Rev October 18, 2019

Vanderbeck's Poem About Rhode Island Slime Mold

The following poem may be the only poem ever written about slime mold — if not the only, it is certainly the best. A few words of explanation should precede any reading of this remarkable "shaggy dog" poem. Rhode Island plays host to a large slime mold called fuligo, which grows around the roots and trunks of dead or dying trees. Although fuligo is believed to be stationary, there are other slime molds which display remarkable behavior: some can actually move from one place to another in quest of nourishment; others are capable of breaking up into thousands of smaller, mobile organisms, which can later rejoin to re-form the original slime mold. Fuligo is attractive in appearance at first, looking ever so much like a large loaf of French bread. Later, it bursts open, revealing yellow and purple patches, quite appalling. Pieter and I are both fascinated by this very Lovecraftian organism. Pieter's poem also plays on the re-division of life into three families: plants, fungi and animals. Some people resist this new classification, since they are convinced that anything alive must be either plant or animal. Biologists have now decided that fungi are so very, very different that they cannot be called plants at all. And slime molds may be something else yet again. Without further ado, here is Pieter's slime mold opus:

OF THE SAME MOLD

He sleeps uneasily —
really not at all.
One thing is on his mind.
It turns over and over.
He turns over and over.
He cannot get it off his mind.
He cannot go to sleep.
He must not.
Once again,
he opens his eyes.
It is still dark.
He looks at the clock.
It is three.
Only three.
He looks out the window
It is not there.
It was there.
He is worried.
He gets up,
throws back the covers,
slips on the slippers,
goes downstairs,
goes outside.

Then he sees it.
It is still there.
But it is not on the tree.
It has moved.
It is at the beginning of his front walk,
about to turn the right angle.
He calculates.
Five hours, five feet.
He can get in a night.
Nothing can happen.
He goes back in.
He must get to sleep.
This cannot go on.

Who would think?
What looks like an omelette turned inside-out,
yellow, white, brown , grey,
amorphous and variegated,
defying any term of description —
that.
Who would think?

He goes back in.
He must sleep.
The door is closed.
That will help.
He is on the second floor.
That is better.
His bedroom door is closed.
If necessary, he can stuff old undershirts beneath it.
Not now.
Not tonight.
He is sure.
The lights go out.
The night is dark.
Dawn. will be approaching,
but for now,
the stars are full out.

It turns.
The walk awaits.
The porch steps.
The porch.
The front door.
The others know.
The ones inside.
They await the joining,
the ones in the walls,
the basement,
the attic,
the contingent from the garage,
they all know.
They await.
Moving quickly now,
(now that he is not up to measure it,)
it slides up the rough walk,
picking up its trail behind it.
It needs every one.
It crosses the cracks.
There is a twig.
It consumes it.
Pemmican.
Trail food,
No stopping on the campaign.

They are gathering.
They know the way under the door.
The garage contingent has entered the back.
They will meet at the stairs.
It will require cantilevering.
No problem.
The threshold has been crossed.
The rug is being attempted.
It is rough,
but it contains a cornucopia of dust mites, and their mites.
Snacks along the trail.
It will leave a swath.

Along the way it encounters various molds.
All colors.
All shapes.
But stationary.
The lower ones.
What to call them?
There is a name,
but it is not polite.
It eats them and goes on.
That’s evolution.
As it gains mass, it accelerates.
They are nearly all gathered by the stairway.
The basement contingent is eating too much along the way.
The night is going fast.
They do not want to put this off for another night.
This was to be the night.
There are other houses.
The city is big.
They can be big too.
It.
Whatever.

 

He snores.
It echoes down the stairway.
He sleeps fitfully.
He is having dreams.
Let him have his dreams.
No more measuring.
He won’t need measuring.
What an empire will be started.
It can go in all directions.
It is only a matter of yards or meters.
A ladder has been established.
The stairway is full of mites.
It is that white carpeted tread,
Valley of Shenandoah,
They’ll, it’ll, whatever’ll, be there in good shape.
One cannot live by tree bark alone.
One, many , whatever.

He snores.
His dreams are over.
The crack beneath the bedroom door is large.
The others are already in there.
They came up through the hot-air register grate,
joined by the ones from the attic.
What a bunch they are.
It is. Whatever.
Why express a thing that changes shape?
It will soon.
It may not get through the door.
It will not need to.
It will be the house.

Only feet now.
Not even yards.
The bed clothes are hanging down.
On all sides they are touching the floor.
They can use Greco-Roman tactlcs.
Classical maneuver.
Right by the book.

He is not snoring now.
He is in deep sleep.
The sky turns slaty blue out the window.
They, it, forms a ring.
A yellow ring.
Brown and grey join white.
Their lack of form is its strength.
No shape, no confrontation.
No consistency, no injury.
No firm entityship, no name.
But one.
They have been called it.
But the terms are not agreed upon.
Is it, they, a plant , an animal, both, neither?
What does it matter?
It, they, gather, gathers.
E Pluribus Unum, E Unibus Plurum.
Soon the house, and then the street,
the so-called neighborhood.
Neighborhood, indeed.

He snorts his last.
His arm hangs over the side.
They will not modify its tactics.
The classical way turns best.
Gather all.
Wait for the strike.
The ascent.
The occupation.
Then they, it, and he will be no different.
There will be reconciliation.
The marriage of Fuligo.

If Only Boris Karloff Were Alive to Perform This

My infamous Halloween-and-Christmas actor's monologue. "Knecht Ruprecht, or The Bad Boy's Christmas," has sent children shrieking in terror to their beds. It was written with the voice of Boris Karloff in mind, and now I have revised it to make it more Karloffian and more British. How? By eliminating almost all contractions, and adding "shall" and "do" in several places. What had sounded liked a gangster-demon talking in a boy's own jargon, is now more horrifyingly polite. I was surprised at how many contractions were in the original, considering how I shun them in my own writing, but the piece is dialogue and I was trying to simulate rather hurried speech, the only place where contractions should be permitted. I am much happier with this new version, Read it aloud, think of Boris, and send a child to bed with nightmares.

Go to Knecht Ruprecht

The Spiders

Nature is not all birds and squirrels.

Under your feet cruel orders thrive.

Things you cannot dream of

     or should not dream of

feed one upon another;

things feed upon them,

every predator a prey,

every parasite sucked dry

by some relentless nemesis.

Look on your lawn —

eight-legged priests in bloated ease

tend their silken tapestries.

Stalk and web make buttresses,

nectar and dew the sunny glow

of rosette windows —

earth throbs with barely audible

enticements of organ threnodies —

deadly cathedral of arachnid gods!

A robed thing (too many legs

to crucify or kill) intones

     Suffer the insects

     to come unto me!

Watch how the chosen victims struggle,

captured in weed-strung ziggurats,

flyers downed, pedestrians waylaid,

sailors shanghaied and paralyzed.

This silken Karnak laced in dew

that only glimmers in early morn

before the sun erases it,

what do its gleamings signify?

They feast on every unshorn acre —

they seek to make the earth but one

necropolis of wolf and garden spider,

eating a billion souls and wanting more.

There is never enough food,

nor time enough to make more spiders!

Male spiders blind in a frenzy of sex.

Black widow brides sport hour-glass bellies

to count the narrow intervals of mating.

Their egg sacs swell with the death
     of the universe.

Barn spider giants bask in the sunlight.

Where any beam drops down

     from the heavens,

Arachne scrambles to lace it over!

Behind the walls, beneath

     the well-swept floorboards

I hear the skitter-skit of daddy-long-legs,
the spiders’ cousins,

insane horsemen of hunger’s apocalypse!

A million spiders in your uncut lawn!

Eight million legs, two million venom fangs!

How many eyes? Some of them have more than two!

They never sleep! They can live forever!

Their stomachs expand to any size!

They have been at it for a hundred million years!

It is better not to think of them.

They do not want you to.

Their webs are meant to be invisible.

They kill and eat and train their offspring silently.

There are more of them every year.

You will now forget that you have ever read this!

-- Revised October 2019

New Expanded Version of "Son of Dracula."

This is one of my most personal poems, from childhood memories and fantasies. It begins in Scottdale PA, then moves to the nosebleed year in West Newton PA, and a scene in McKeesport Hospital. Recently, I made this into a prose piece, and in the process, additional lines came to be. Now I unfold those new revisions back into the poem. It is better now.

ANNIVERSARIUM XVI:

SON OF DRACULA

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
          reached up for Frankenstein
                  at Shelley, Mary
               (not pausing at Percy Bysshe!)
          then 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 a red-eyed vermin horde!
To be, himself, a bat
     or a cloud of mist,
to rest in earth
throughout 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 in 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, the passer-through.

(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 —
    He never arrived.

At thirteen, 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 wardroom 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, I was Undead
since all around me were Unalive.

I had turned the sounds of Berlioz
and his aural witches’ sabbath into words,
and the words, the images of night winds,
sulky witch sarabandes and wizards’ orgies,
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 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.

At the Abbey of Bury St. Edmund's

by Brett Rutherford

Had they not
refused their fathers’ blessings
before they set out,
masters of the league of thieves —

Had they not
found unguarded, thanks
the sextons’ drunkenness,
the Burial Church of St. Edmund —

Had they not
in eagerness for profit
pried the iron nails
from the wooden door —

Had they not
in gold-lust, that Midas curse,
tried to pry loose
the gilding
above the lintel —

Had they not
left so visible a ladder
in alleyway
as two of them clambered
up to search for gaps
in the terracotta —

Had they not
made noise enough
to wake the dead
with shovel, pick, and hammer
in every-which-way attack
on the portal —

Had they not
greedily indulged in
“Mushrooms, fresh today!”
at the nearby inn that night

then off they would have gone
with the bones of St. Edmund,
some to re-sell
to ardent collectors,
some to grind up
for miracle cures,
but no!  All eight
fell down in one flow
of writhing limbs, hands
clasping their tools
and implements;
down, too,
the clattering ladder.

Eyes glazed, arms frozen
in acts of desecration,
they lay inert,
till well past dawn.

The watchman found them,
paralyzed yet breathing.
The bailiff was called.
A crowd assembled.
The burglars’ tools
were noted and catalogued.

A miracle! All cried
as thieves awoke
and were put in irons.
An eager friar
passing that way
on a pilgrimage,
reclaimed the precious
door-nails,
stuffed the torn gilding
into his mendicant bag,
and shuffled away.

The crowd moved
to the gallows’ square
where Bishop Theodred
condemned all eight
to share a single gibbet.

A miracle! The crowd chants

as word of the failed robbery

spreads far and wide.
Saint Edmund saved himself!

Ah! moaned the eldest thief,
had we not
partaken of
that mushroom stew!

The Girls from Fifty-Ninth Street

by Emilie Glen

Bunch of girls
come to the Coney sea
in their bathing-suit best
under toreador pants,
feel about as exclusive
as oranges in a crate,
keep their high-teased hairdos
out of the fright-wigging sea,
move their beach towels down-shore
to sands a bit more exclusive,
same difference as between
a ninety-nine cent and dollar ninety-nine item —
who knows who might spread towel nearby?

Bunch of boys
     beached in tighter than sand fleas
step over people
     push sands toward a shoreless Coney,
sunglass the girls elbowing up
     from their nautical towels,
cast off with
     Oh shit! The girls from Fifty-Ninth Street!


From the forthcoming chapbook, Moon Laundry.

Mysteries of Elsdon Churchyard

It was inevitable that I would finally write a poem about my ancestral home in Northumberland, the town of Elsdon, from my which great-great grandparents emigrated to Pennsylvania.

1

Why did the bell
of Elsdon Church
resound
across the landscape,

shaking the ground
of the tumulus mound
above the empty motte
of Elsdon Castle?

Why did the voice
of St. Cuthbert’s minister
echo deep mystery
in even a commonplace
sermon, bass-deep
from a voice that was
no lower than baritone?

Thank the medieval
architect who thrust
three horses’ skulls
upright into an oaken
cabinet,

a resonance box
suspended
within the bell-tower.

Bell above
thrice amplified below
and out across
the countryside;

preacher in pulpit
graced with the tone
of thunder-Jehovah.

2

Whose the stone
coffin that leans
against the wall

of St. Cuthbert’s?

No one can move it,
and no one knows
what sacred corpse
reclined within its hollow,
sculpted to human
silhouette.

Monks, it was said,
came here with relics
of St. Cuthbert,
in flight from the Vikings,

but who could flee
cross-country
with a stone sepulchre
and the eight horses
and cumbersome cart
it would take to haul
an entire saint
and his equipage?

No, this was not Cuthbert
whose tomb
rests finally in Durham,
but some unknown knight,
perhaps, who willed
himself a mighty coffin
where neither rat nor worm
could mar his godlike
features —

Yet what is left?
Lidless, leaning
against a wall
where dogs and derelicts
can lift a leg,

flesh, armor and bones
all gone, a hollow
in human outline,
no man and
Everyman.

3

Before Elli’s Valley
became “Elsdon,”
before the invading
Vikings,
before the Normans,
who built Elsdon Castle
before the Saxons,
guttering the Anglish
tongue, Romans
lived here and prospered,
secure in their reign
amid their household
and temple gods.

Here, against the unwilling
walls of Saint Cuthbert’s
a Roman gravestone.

To the divine Manes,

he of the prefect
of the first cohort
of the Augustan of the Lusitani,
also of the second cohort
of the Breuci, subcurator
of the Flaminian Way
and of the distribution
of maintenance,
subcurator of public works.

Julia Lucilla had this erected
to her husband well deserving.
He lived forty-eight years
six months and five days.

Pushed back southward
from the Antonine Wall
to Hadrian’s Wall, then out
of Britain altogether
as barbarians swarmed Europe,
Romans left only stones,
deep-buried lares and penates
beneath their houses,
the envied ruins
of colossal baths, the heads
and torsos of toppled gods.

Still, every English ghost
looks out to sea
for the dreaded Viking sails,
and treads lightly, lest
a Roman hand reach up
to seize its ankle.

Turn any stone
and a face looks up.