Moving to Providence, 1985

by Brett Rutherford

This is Providence when it was still rather a hell-hole, but a very cheap place for writers to live. I moved there with my Siamese cat in 1985 and had eleven rooms in a Victorian house, for $450 a month. The unofficial state motto was "Mobsters and Lobsters" and the natives were exceedingly unfriendly. I lived there three years before I ever set foot in another person's house. I just found these poetic journal entries describing how awful it was, or seemed to be. For inexplicable reasons, I would spend almost half of my adult years in New England.

I have moved to Providence,

a writer’s paradise of low rents and large spaces.

The natives speak a dialect of broken English

conjugated with expletives. I have never heard

so many Fs and mother-F’s on a city bus.

They drive outdated cars, wide as bombers,

paint-scraped and dented,

leprous with rust-spot camouflage

turn corners with daring and macho screeches,

black trails of tires at every corner.

Boys at the corner loiter for cars, hand men
those little bags of powder they crave
as they furtively leave the off-ramp
for our disreputable neighborhood.
That the bags are full of baking powder
they will only learn later as even boys
know well the rules of cheat and sharp trading.

Eight of ten voters are Catholic,
virgins in little inverted bath-tubs adorn
the house fronts of the treeless side streets.
An old man tells me, “No trees. No birds.
No squirrels. No nuts. No leaves to rake.”

The heads of state and their families

control unmeasured tracts of property.

The governor’s name and picture adorn

each monolith and highway ramp.
Each sign must include “His Excellency”
before the current felon’s proper name.

The marble capitol is large enough

     to detain, if necessary,

     the entire electorate.

Well-known gangsters reside discreetly,

unperturbed by warrants or searches.
One tip-toes past the vending machine
storefront, the funeral home, the house
of the respected grandmother “of that name.”

Free enterprise is encouraged, narcotically.

Homes of the Anglo-rich are frequently burgled.

On a hill, the prestigious University

trains the sons of the rich

to assume their places of power.

The city is full of history, devoid of culture.

It drove out Poe, and tolerated Lovecraft
while watching him slant and starve.

It imports insults and toxic waste,

exports the simulacrum of itself:

cobblestones and shuttlecocks,

andirons and lightning rods and tassled shawls,

a horse, a red hen, a barrel of molasses

fresh from the Triangle trade.

The natives are known for aloofness,

their way of sidestepping foreigners.

Only family are invited to dinner.

Young men leave the state

to find a girl who isn't a cousin.

One must be introduced to a prostitute.

Despite all this, the artists come here.

Cheap is cheap. Besides, where else

can you find a Third World Country

without leaving New England?

The Vampire Victims' Club - A Short Short Story

by Brett Rutherford

I meet a group of middle-aged ladies at the diner. I cannot tell you their names, or what they look like. I am good at details, but I cannot describe them. Except that there are four. I don’t even see them sitting there at first until one of them calls my name.

Once I am seated, the waitress comes over. She gives me a menu.

One of the women says, “May we have menus, too?”

The waitress starts, says, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t see you all sitting there. Just a minute.”

The women tell me this happens all the time. “We feel invisible,” one says.

I joke about us all getting older. But honestly, I cannot tell one from another. They are middle-aged, nondescript. Only their differently-colored coats mark them apart.

“It’s not that. It’s because of him,” one says. They all nod.

What we are here to talk about is that they have a Meetup group. It’s called The Vampire Victims’ Club.

The founder tells me that they first met when one of them placed an online ad asking:
Has a famous celebrity sucked your blood? Me too, let’s talk.

Soon six were in touch, but all afraid to meet. They knew there were others, so the four brave enough to meet in person started this Meetup group with the more generic name, The Vampire Victims Club.

“We got a lot of Goth girls at first. To them it was play. You know, bad boyfriends who cut them with knives, or used a little dainty syringe. Blood-dabblers.

“When they saw us, how we were pale without make-up. When we told them what anemia really was, and how we were slowly wasting away, well, off they went, back to their boys with little fake vampire teeth.

“What we all came to realize is that there’s only one in mid-town. ”

“One what?” I ask.

“Why, vampire, of course. It’s always him, him all the time. He must have driven the others like him away.”

“No one will ever believe you,” he says to all of us. “Oh, such alibis he has. His limo drops him off at some fancy club or fund-raiser. Then halfway through, he slips away, men’s room and then a back doorway. Then he’s a few blocks away at the kind of place a divorced woman or a single mother goes, dim-lit and quiet. Slow drinks and flirts. Married men who want a secret girlfriend, mostly. Or sad widowers – you hope to meet one of those with money.

“Then in comes Mister Billionaire, discreetly, hat drooping low in that pretend-you-don’t-know-who-I-am mode.

“So he buys you a drink, and you talk, and you pretend not to know who he is. And he flirts and you say Oh, come on now, I know who you are. You have your pick of all those showgirls. Porn stars even. Why do you want to hurt a poor girl’s feelings? And then he says he’s just enjoyed talking to someone who didn’t want to play sugardaddy games, and he felt very at home with you and would like to, you know, get to know you.”

“And all the time his limo is sitting outside the charity ball?” I ask.

“Oh, even worse. Sometimes his wife is sitting back there. You know, the famous model. And she’s looking at her watch and fuming, and putting on fake smiles and the little ‘who knows’ shrug when someone asks her ‘Where is your husband?’

“And over there, three streets away, he’s led you out through a back door and you think you’re going to be in his limo for a joyride around the island, maybe a bad time, or maybe a story you’ll tell your girlfriends about for years, or maybe, just maybe, he actually sees something in you …”

“And?”

“And instead you turn a corner into an alleyway and you say, “I don’t think we should walk this way.”

And he says, “Not to worry, I know this street like the back of my hand. And then you’re up against a brick wall all cold and clammy and he’s got your legs apart and think he’s going to. And then, no, he’s at your throat and it burns and surges and the life is going out of you. And then he stops, and laughs, and waves his hands in front of your face in a peculiar way and says, “Be here tomorrow. This place, at midnight. And he puts something in your purse, and when you look later, its enough to pay your rent for half a year.”

“Was it just once, then, I ask?”

Another woman chimes in. “It’s never just once. I’m his Monday victim.” Pointing: “She’s every Wednesday.”

“And I am Friday’s victim,” the first woman says. Every Friday. In that alley, three blocks from the most expensive restaurant in New York.”

“We’re just his cafeteria,” the fourth one chimes in. “I’m the youngest, as you can see. Weekends I have to wait, in a suite in his office tower, for whenever he can get away.”

“She’ll outlive the rest of us,” one says bitterly. “She just gets him through Sunday. He hardly takes a thimbleful. A snack.”

“Or maybe he’s grooming me to be his next wife,” says Number Four. “Like in the movies.”

In answer, dark laughter and the shaking of heads.

“And none of you have gone to the police? Is that why you invited me here, to get the word out?”

There is a long silence.

“Each of us has tried to go to the police. You see the station, the one on 57^th Street. You turn the corner. You start walking. Your steps get tinier and tinier. You’re walking like an old lady. And then you’re hanging on to a lamp-post, almost fainting. And you reel for a trashcan, vomiting.”

“I tried by phone. I dialed the police. When someone answered, all I could do was squeak, “I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I didn’t mean to call this number.’”

“Post hypnotic suggestion?” I speculate.

“The other thing is, mister, is that no one can see us. You noticed that when you came in. No one comes up to any of us and says, ‘You’re looking terrible. Let me get you to a doctor.’ It’s getting worse as the life drains out of us. When one of us dies, they might not even find our bodies, just husks behind the dumpsters, stuff no one would touch or even try to name.”

“I find that hard to believe.” I wonder if this was an elaborate hoax.

“Show him Mildred!” the third one intones.

“We were five originally,” the first explained. Her weary hands reach into a shopping bag. “Mildred was oldest, and weakest. Once, she was a Rockette, then a cocktail waitress. She was the first one he made a ‘regular.”

She pushes aside the coffee cups and menus, and lays a thing before me.

It smells of whisky, beer, sawdust and vomit, the reek of an alley behind a sodden bar.
Its mottled color is that of fungus, newspapers yellowed in cat urine, and soot.

It weighs almost nothing, the lint of laundromat, the clot of forgotten spiderweb, a bird’s nest.

It has no shape I can name, a tapestry of shreds and sticks and filth.

Except for the woman’s face dead center in its fractals of trash, it is nothing.

Nothing, nothing at all, I chant as I flee, stunned as though hypnotized, and when I look back the diner booth is empty.

Introduction to Tales of Wonder, Volume 1

Tales of Wonder is a landmark work in the history of Gothic literature, and a milestone in Romantic poetry. Percy Shelley owned the book as a young man, and drew ghosts and monsters in its margins; indeed, a cluster of Shelley’s juvenile poems are imitations of the supernatural ballads collected here. Sir Walter Scott allowed himself to be tutored by its author and compiler, and both Scott and Robert Southey provided Gothic poems and ballads for the collection, originally to be titled Tales of Terror.

When the promised anthology failed to appear in due course, Scott pulled together the poems he had in hand and privately printed a sampler, titled An Apology for Tales of Terror. Only five copies of this 1799 book survive, and its mere existence has led some to believe, erroneously, that the Apology is the first edition of the present work.

Tales of Wonder was published in 1801 in two volumes in London, printed by W. Bulmer and Co., and sold by J. Bell. A second edition was issued later that year, in one volume, with Robert Southey’s poems removed. (1) The single-volume second edition was the bookseller’s response to complaints about the price of the two-volume set, and the inclusion, in the second volume, of many poems readily available to readers. The first Dublin printing in 1801 was the one-volume version. The two-volume version did not lack for buyers, however: an 1805 printing in Dublin, “printed for P. Wogan,” is based on the two-volume original, and includes Southey’s poems once again. (2)

Another book, confusingly titled Tales of Terror, appeared later in 1801, and as the bookseller suggested it as a suitable companion for Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, it was mistakenly assumed by many to be Lewis’s own work. The authorship of the spurious Tales of Terror has never been determined. The anthology contains a number of inflated parodies of supernatural ballads, alongside some that seem to be in the Lewis vein. Aside from an interesting verse Apologia for the Gothic that reflects contemporaneous debates about horror and The Sublime, it is otherwise a sophomoric production, perhaps intended to ridicule Lewis. Lewis seems to have ignored it, or to have quietly enjoyed the further notoriety it produced. It cost someone a good deal of money to produce, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Lewis participated in some way. 

More than two decades ago, I came into possession of a dog-eared copy of Henry Morley’s 1887 compilation, titled  Tales of Terror and Wonder. Morley cobbled together the Lewis original with the spurious Tales of Terror, and, where pages were missing from his copies of the two books, he simply omitted those poems. Morley’s introductory essay has so many rabbit holes of error that it is best not to read it, nor to torment others by citing it. 
My original intent, when embarking on this project, was simply to find Lewis’s first edition and to make it available once again. 

At first glance, many of these poems seem to be works of pure imagination. Many occupy a Gothic realm of knights, libidinous monks, devils and witches, ravished damsels and haunted woods. Once I had determined to annotate the poems, however — intending to limit myself to defining arcane words for today’s students or general readers — I discovered that many of these poems have a deep history, rooted not only in their literary sources but also in specific times and places. My intertextual detective work has sought out alternate tellings of the narrative in these poems, in some cases finding the actual source, one dating back to 300 BCE.

The research into these poems also introduced me to the work of several generations of scholars who collected Runic poetry and English and Scottish ballads. These eccentrics — some clerics and some gentlemen with the income and inclination to explore monastery libraries or transcribe Runic stone carvings — were at work in a serious intellectual project: to ground Britain in an alternate pre-history that was neither Biblical nor Greco-Roman. This pagan yearning for Icelandic and Danish and Saxon literary and historical roots, is celebrated in some of the poems in this book. Although there are no dour Druids here, the lore of Wotan/Odin and the sombre epics of the North figure large.

The annotations in this new edition document the origins of the poems Lewis translated or selected. In some cases, I have inserted alternate translations or originals; in others I am content to point interested readers to the sources. The great mother lode of English and Scottish ballads can be found in Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, LeGrand’s Fabliaux, and Evans’ A Collection of Old Ballads. Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, although published later in the century (starting in 1868), is also cited frequently in the notes, since the Child ballad collection is comprehensive and the numbering of the ballads therein has become a standard cataloging reference. 

It should not be forgotten that the literary ballad, where it is not a complete invention, is fossil evidence of a work intended to be sung, and accompanied by some kind of instrument. Some supernatural ballads were also transmitted in broadsheets and printed collections, often with musical notation. Ballad-singing was a tea-time entertainment, and sophisticated settings of such ballads by Haydn and Beethoven kept the text of the ballad in the public eye as song lyrics. The leap from folk-lyric to literary ballad set a higher standard for the ballad-as-text, and Lewis and his peers made it their business to add metric regularity and poetic diction into the sometimes rougher-hewn originals. Sometimes the texts are Anglicised or modernized; other times a new-fangled poem is cast in archaic language, either for atmosphere or as an outright literary hoax.

These editors, who collected ballads from oral transmission, also stood on the shoulders of monks and chroniclers who passed along, in Latin, wonderful tall tales such as “The Old Woman of Berkeley.” One approaches these ballad compilations with awe and caution commingled: some of the poets in this collection were involved in the creation of mock ballads that passed back into the literature. 

Now that this first of two volumes is in hand, it is possible to step back and look at the remarkable range of work Lewis has assembled, skewed as the first volume is with the compiler’s eagerness to put his own work forward. Here we are treated to a ghost/vampire tale first penned around 300 BCE; a Runic funeral song from the tenth century CE; a meeting between the Saxon invader of England and a Roman ghost; a Nordic warrior woman’s incantation to raise her father from the dead; Goethe’s blood-curdling multi-voiced “Erl-King” and fatal water nymphs;  the monk and nun who try (unsuccessfully) to save their witch mother from the Devil; a proud painter’s encounters with Satan; a doomed romance set in the horrific landscape of the War of the Spanish Succession; and the endless forest ride of “The Wild Huntsmen.” (In the second volume, the reader will encounter work by Burns, Dryden, Jonson, Gray, and Bürger, as well as items from the Percy and Evans collections of old ballads.)

One caveat for the reader weaned on modern poetry is that even the “Romantic” poets featured here employ forms, meters and language from an era earlier than their own, even sometimes to the extent of perpetrating a literary hoax à la Ossian. The Gothic esthetic by its nature is backward-looking. It takes some adjustment for today’s reader to enjoy these poems for what they are, and read them in the context of their own time. Against the stifling moral and correct tone of most 18th century verse, this is pretty strong stuff, a bracing counter-esthetic. 

We need also remember that Lewis — whose Gothic plays shocked and appalled London audiences, and whose lurid novel, The Monk, mixed sex and demon possession — invested much in this book. Far more than just self-promotion of his own Gothic verses, the range of material selected demonstrates the unbroken interest in the weird and wonderful stretching back to antiquity. 

A certain degree of macabre relish, what I call “the smile behind the skull,” is also evident throughout. The poems here are unlikely to frighten anyone other than the superstitious, or very small children; instead, they delight those of a Gothic predilection who enjoy the sublime frisson of danger and supernatural awe. The tone of this book sets the mode for erudition, arcane allusion, atmosphere and devastation — with a dose of Grand Guignol humor for the initiate — that we will see later in Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft would have recognized Lewis and the antiquarian eccentrics whose work anticipates Gothic poetry, as brothers.

I would like to acknowledge Lance Arney, who many years ago undertook the task of typing the 1887 Tales of Terror and Wonder into a computer. He raised the question of whether some of the poems in that edition were so absurd as to be parodies, and, as it turned out, he was correct. 

In one of those delightful (or dismaying) coincidences of publishing, my first edition of Volume I of Tales of Wonder was published in October 2010, and Broadview Editions issued its own Tales of Wonder, edited by Douglass H. Thomson, the same month. I had not been familiar with any of Dr. Thomson’s remarkable work except his research, published online, into the Walter Scott Apology for Tales of Terror, to which I had referred readers. 

Thomson’s masterful introduction and notes go into great depth about the place of Lewis’s work in the development of Gothic romanticism, and he devotes many pages to the problem of parody in the supernatural poems Lewis wrote and chose. Although he limits himself to Volume I and selections from Volume II, and a few selections from the spurious Tales of Terror, Thomson’s edition is indispensable for scholars. 

My somewhat different focus requires the republication and annotation of both volumes, as Lewis presented them in 1801, illuminated by a study of the textual and narrative sources of the poems, and such information about the poets as will shed light on the interpretation of the text. I am also undaunted by the “tales of plunder” accusation against Lewis for using already-familiar poems and ballads, since most of the texts presented here will be new to today’s reader. My aim in this two-volume edition is to serve the educated general reader (whose existence I still believe in) as well as the academic. Happily, since this project is published in print and in ebook format with today’s “on demand” printing, I can continue to revise Tales of Wonder as new information comes to hand.

I hope that this new edition of the real Tales of Wonder will help restore Matthew Gregory Lewis to his rightful place in the history of Gothic literature and of Romanticism. Although biographers of Mary Shelley have made note of “Monk” Lewis’s visit to the Villa Deodati in 1816, and the sharing ghost stories among Lewis, Lord Byron, Dr. Polidori, and Percy and Mary Shelley, none seem to have realized who among them had the most to say about the writing of a ghost story.

I am delighted that Tales of Wonder is finally coming into its own.

Volume 1 can be purchased here from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0922558612

The Were-Raven, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

    Adapted from an ancient Danish Ballad

1

The Raven began his journey at dusk;
by day he never flew. By rise of moon
in fullest orb he traveled far; by dark
of moon he fled to the bats’ company

in cave and belfry and the mountain pine.
So wide of wing was he, so baleful-eyed,
it was an ill-fortune to come upon
his perch, his roost or his dark sleeping place.

Time and again to one spot he fluttered —
a terror to lark and dove, a terror
to all who sang vespers and prayed Amens —
he came to where, in one lonely bower
the lady Ermeline was wont to weep.

She saw him not, although his shadow long
cast double penumbrae in moon and star-
light, tall as a man, so deep in mourning
was the lady whose eyes ne’er upward glanced.

And so, ill-omened, un-noted, he flew
away, South to the dread desert’s sand-verge,
North, to the last ice-pack of the Boreal Pole,
up, to the place above cloud-tops where snow

sings crystal anthems and the air is thin,
and still, from everywhere, his corvid eye
followed the downward glance of Ermeline
as she embroidered, sighed, and put aside
her day-time’s dull handiwork. Her hands shook;
she touched for forehead for signs of fever,
and finding none, turned to her lonely bed.

She slept, and as he watched her distantly,
another hovered, reached out a strangling
hand, and snapped it back, self-stung with conscience.
Whatever it was, it watched him watching
her, and slithered off, a serpent of mist.

One night, when moon was full, and stars were right,
and the garden was diamond-bright with night’s
aurora of fireflies and Northern lights,
and Ermeline walked alone as ever,
he found the courage to speak: “Tell me true,
fair and alone, my Lady Ermeline,
why do you linger in the chill garden
to shed so many tears? Compete with dew,
or a raincloud to water these flagstones?”

Fair Ermeline started, but saw not him.
“Who are you, Stranger, to dare address me
so from darkness? Two eyes I see, but all
the rest of you is shrouded in shadow.” —

“Fear not,” the Raven stepped now forth. “I asked
why to the world’s weeping you add the more,
when one so fair is made for life and joying.
Who have you lost?” he paused. “A brother dear?
Or mother or father, or some beloved?” —

“Raven, dire friend, thou messenger of Death,
have you of all the feathered host come now
to mock me, or to hear my tale of woe,
because a maiden’s sorrows fill thy beak?”

“Admit me to thy side a while,” he said,
but let me perch upon yon pediment
so that your whisperings and my coarse caw
shall be as solemn as confessional.” —

“Am I thus doomed, wild Raven! If thou art
my confidant and confessor, who next
have I to counsel with but crow and kite,
and the malevolent sea cormorant?” —

“I will remain till thou hast told thy tale.
More than night-bird am I, but less than man.
I mean to know your sorrow’s own story.” —
Her eyes met his. — “I will tell all to you.”

-- to be continued --

Gertrude and the Revenant

by Brett Rutherford

     A Heathen tale of the Danes
         made Christian, but just barely.

First and fairest — virgin maid —
in all the realms of Charlemagne,
to her from far and near the plea
came, Help us, saint and prophetess!

Godfather but newly dead, left
to Gertrude alone his towers.
Red the banners boldly blazoned,

but in time there came a count,
envious-eyed with armed minions
to spoil and waste the land about,

until the proud tower, prey
to malice and treason, fell.
By secret way and cavern, she

alone escaped their ravages.
Of all her silks and jewels, none
were left to her. One staff and book

was all she took upon her pilgrim
way, not to the Emperor, not
to some neighbor lord for succor,

but to the graveyard cold and drear,
where, striking her staff inside the tomb
and opening her book of elder lore,

she read a chapter to open the way,
another more for the summoning,
a third to name the awakened dead.

Loud she read, the wind her clamor,
the thunder her drum, the owl
her oboe shrill and quickening

until the dead man heard her song.
With moan as deep as mountain
echo, up rose the shaggèd head

of one she knew but all too well
(in horror she averted eye
from the rotted sockets' glare).

"Who dares with ancient lore
and cursed magic to summon me?"
the rotting thing now roared.

Upon her knees she fell, a-tremble.
"Refuse me not, 't is I, Gertrude,
god-daughter and heir, 't is I

"who kneeling implore your ghost,
for none alive can aid me.
To a count unknown to me

"the gates were thrown, the walls
fell undefended, tower to cellar
looted, the women ravished.

"The peasants groan, their corn,
not even a seed for planting,
has been carried off by one

"who honors neither law nor custom,
but takes whatever his arm
can seize. The monks are fled,

"the village bells are silent. Soon
snow will come, and all will starve.
Help me, god-father dear!"

And hearing this, the stone
above the corpse was pushed aside.
The walls of the vault exploded.

Stood he on his long legs strong,
flesh-rot returned to sinew,
godly grew his arms and shoulders.

Went they the maid and skeleton
back to the tower by line of sight,
trees sundered, tombs toppled,

streams forded whether or no
the waters favored, on they went,
until the towers' doors he rent.

The living courtiers crept away,
the traitorous followers fled,
even the bartered ill-used wives.

Gone they were like dew of dawn.
Only the Count stood firm.
He laughed at Gertrude and the shade.

"You, Revenant, I fear you not,"
he said, not putting down his cup.
"I am a warrior proven strong

"and you are only a skeleton.
Come forth and match me
hand for hand, and here I stand

"swordless and defy you.
This tower and all its fiefs
are mine now, stone to straw."

Slow he moved with dead man's gait,
dead heart pulsing in vacant
rib-cage, and then the skeleton

Was upon him, "One!" he said,
as bony hands gripped
the warrior's belt and tunic.

"For this tower is mine!"
Arms wrapped a waist
more fit for feast than fighting

and raised him a-high. A snap

and a cry, and his spine was twain.
"Two! For the scoured land!"

Thrust up again, the rag-doll

ruffian was seized at knees,
and both snapped as saplings

give way to the broad axe.

"Three! For thou hast offended
a woman not only of grace

and beauty, but witching ways!

Beware the woman with rod
and book, who keens the wind

"and raises the angry dead

to avenge her." That said,
the skeleton collapsed

and never more spoke, nor

walked of its own accord, nay,

not even a whisper uttered.

That eve, the bones took up
she into a burlap sack,
and Gertrude, shunning all,

carried her burden sore
to the sundered tomb, and laid
bone by bone into his bed

the beloved godfather,
then from a rose bloomed
out of season, she plucked

three petals, and knelt

and prayed to whatever
it was she believed in.

And the earth closed up,

and the tomb walls righted,
and the toppled cross

returned to its place
above the doorway.
She built a great church.

The grateful folk filed in
to see its gilded roof
and hear the chastened monks

sing Te Deum laudaumus,
over the silent bones.
Gertrude, silent, smiled.

Domitian's Black Room

by Brett Rutherford

Do you know who I am?
Do you know what this place is?
Bribe-takers, slave rapers, virgin-
abductors, temple defilers, daughter
seducers, wine adulterers, slum-
owning generators of a thousand
vices, some yet to be named!

I am Domitian, your Emperor!
Kneel and abase yourselves.
Your God! (I see that all
but three are on their knees.

Look how they grovel!) A hug,
Martius, and Gemellus, and Titus.
You smile and stand, you get
the joke. What is this place?

In the rest come now,
two by two through the black
corridor to greet me,
now that my “temple oracle”
voice has died away.

Marus, I see you have soiled your toga!
Go off to the side there and get another.
What, Senator, no mirthful greeting?
(Just watch as all the old men’s
remaining teeth light up
as they invent forced grins, watch next
as their hands lift up the folds of robes
to ease the coming bows and curtseys.)

Down to your knees, I see,
as if to beg pardon, no doubt for all
that I have agreed to know, yet overlook.
Up! Up! Was the way well-lit?
Did torches fail to reflect
the black hues of jet and onyx?
Did you perspire to near fainting
as you passed the grates
through which you viewed
my room of sharpened axes?

Ha! I heard some count aloud
how many steps they descended
as you came down to reach me.

Your protests were noted
when your own guards
were replaced by my Praetorians.
Spotting a soldier he knew,
our friend Vitruvius offered
his tender bottom if only they’d let
him go back to his villa
afterwards. He’ll join us soon,
once ten Praetorians
have had their way with him.

Whatever bribes you gave
from your purses, those rings
and armlets, I’ll pile them up
and find some better use
than the adornment of reprobates.

Not in your life have any of you
been this far below the ground.
There are things down here
that even the Etruscans dread.

Did you hear the hard rush
of the Tiber waters,
the groan of the Cloaca Maxima
as you passed below the rat-filled deep?

I heard one say the word “Avernus.”
Every word echoes down to me  —
everything! I heard one mumbled
Nazarene prayer, but not who uttered it.
Dream on of Hell and Hades:
I am down here awaiting you.
You are the first to come
to the Black Room of Domitian.
I will summon others after you!
There are lists! There are lists!

Stop that wailing and murmuring now!
Ring that gong over there!
Again! They hear us! They stir!
The iron doors groan open
(a nice effect, I must say,
and look at some of them, fainting!)

Eheu, what is this place? Look up,
you sniveling millionaires
and Senators. It is dinner!
Ha! Ha!    Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!