The Winner

by Brett Rutherford

Damn if he didn't beat the odds!

John won the lottery.
He spent all night
listing the things he'd do
as soon as the cash
filled his house to the rafters.

Running downtown
to find a lawyer,
crosswalk-waiting
at Fifth and Smithfield

(not taking any chances
with his hundreds
of millions!)

he was struck
by a falling meteorite,
a fireball so hot
he was sublimed
to a dirt-brown cloud
that instantly dispersed.

Crowds edged
the sinkhole crater,
wondering who …

--   

The Times That Burn the Brain

by Brett Rutherford

(I hid a few rhyming poems in The Pumpkined Heart. This was one of them.)

The times that burn the brain are few:
when art commands that love be shed;
when you last expect to see the dead,
now truly gone, come into view;

when abstract thoughts become mere breath
upon the tongue, and Liberty
lies down with chains and musketry;
when you admit that gainless death

burns thousands from a tyrant brain
and murder stains your nation’s face,
as one by one the storms erase
all freedoms in a bloody rain;

to climb a hill before the dawn
and find your heart’s last village lost
into the concrete void of time,
to know the past is now beyond
your step, yourself a wordy ghost,
unchanging, in a rhyme.


1973, rev. 2019.

A Wing of Time (2019 version)

by Brett Rutherford

This little "Twilight Zone" episode narrative poem has me going back in time in 1973, revisiting the college town where I lived from 1965 to 1969. Ironic now that I felt "so much older."

This village street will always split me —
     half in the gray-fringed present,
     half quarked away in time
from dull today to that brilliant
     yesterday — a day I am not yet
     twenty and the maples seem shorter,
          the houses whiter, the sky
a bluer blue through eyes unclouded.

I stand before a dingy storefront.
Back then it was a dress shop
     with but a single mannequin.
Next to it was Gorman’s
     steamy laundromat
churning students’ underwear and towels,
a nickel-dime-quarter juggernaut
devouring stray socks, a treasuryof  lint and buttons.

Above the laundry, beyond that rotting
window-frame, was my first apartment.
Was it fifteen dollars a month I paid
for two converted office rooms,
     a hallway bathroom and shower?
Are those the same curtains still,
tattered and colorless as I found them
and left them? The same glass,
certainly, through which I watched
the leaf-fall, lightning, snowstorm,
the neon light of the Hotel Bar
(no one under twenty-one admitted!)

I see the pale green painted wall
not changed in grudging landlord years.
I climb the narrow stairs, pass down
the beer-corroded corridor to my door,
whose frosted glass was once gold-leafed
with some insurance agent’s name.

Do I do this? Are my hand, nervous,
solid enough to knock, or am I dreaming?
My tap on the glass is solid enough.
A thin blond woman answers, puzzled.
I tell her I lived her as a student,
     oh, many years ago.
Could I just stand here a moment,
look out her window at the village green? —

where someone, in unintended irony,
has placed the town’s own name
in giant wooden letters,
     as though the inhabitants
     needed to be reminded,
the traveler admonished.
Sinners, this is Edinboro!
Fathers, guard your daughters!

A wave of heat rolls through the trees outside.
Were it a wing of Time, whose darker side
enfolds the past, what memories appear?
I see the vanished store whose wooden frame
extends into the square, a blur of green
as sycamores sawed down or thunderstruck
burst back to view. A sigh of life unfurls,
the lake regains its water lily bloom,
long-dead sparrows rebuild forgotten nests,
and on the street, departed friends go by —


Squat Bertha goes to get her mail. Next door,
her restaurant slides to bankruptcy,
unpaid employees and a sheriff’s sale.
I heard her scold her harried waitresses
for wasting moldy pie. Do it like this! —
she flipped the pie-slice over deftly
then scraped a knife across the furry crust,
flipping it back to who would ever know —
now serve it with a smile! Above her store, 
she had her quart of beer, remembering
the brothel she ran in her Erie days.
The men in her rooms are boarders, students.
Deans and professors eat at her table.
Head high, she’s almost respectable now.

I see four shadows in the alleyway —
three high school boys and a slow-minded girl.
She goes there often. They catch her there,
against the wall their prying hands adept
at raising her skirt, stealing quick pleasure.
After the shadows mingle, pressed on brick,
sneakered feet scatter in every direction.  

Outside the bar, the college boys loitering
swoon as Jamie and her sketchpad pass them.
Her tied-back hair jet black, her almond eyes
Eurasian orbs of challenge and surrender.
Her breasts move through their dreams 
          like wrecking cranes.
Her siren silhouette, voice-song, Muse-call,
perfect things, untouchably sufficient.
It was enough that she existed here.

Now others pass: a student prince who died
in megalo-brainfire tumor madness;
the tragic bronchial artist coughing,
imagining consumption’s early death;
one, two, a half dozen for Vietnam,
whose jungles would cripple them, or kill them
(one whose body was never found, looks up
as though his ghost and my vision had locked);

my best friends, the mad and sad ones, strolling
on by as though I still awaited them —
the best of their time, the dreamer drop-outs,
acid, depression, poverty and war
cutting its swath through my generation.
In this interval a hundred have passed,
known and unknown, the loved and the yearned-for,
all of them still before their beginnings,
not drinking the poison of compromise,
not marrying lies, denying visions,
not using youth to engender monsters.
They do not see my future looking down,
not one of them seems coarse or mediocre.

And there, impossibly, I see myself,
a younger form, approach.
He is by all standards, pretty much
     out of his mind.
His eyes are wide with poems.
He turns and looks back at passers-by
if they happened to have beautiful eyes.
He is carrying a batch
     of his underground newspaper
     giving them out     
          to everyone he recognizes.
He enters through the door below,
his footsteps sure upon the stair.
I turn, I dash into the darkened hall.
I hide in the bathroom until he passes,
then tread my way silently
to the street, and to the present..

He only cares about the future.
I wish I could warn him.
I think he was very foolish
    to linger here,
as I was foolish to return.

Yet this is what I learned:
I always thought others the meteors,
racing on by, too hot to touch,
never quite seen or palpable.
I thought the world a-spin
away and beneath my grasp,
yet here it sits, slow in its orbit
as a banana slug.
And now I understand:
I was the meteor. I am the meteor.
I blaze through. Nothing remains
of me but these etched words.

Hither and Yon

by Brett Rutherford

There is one who loves me,

     three towns hither,
and there is one I love,
     just three towns yon.

Yet over all of us one hand

has painted the same starry vault
that rotates just the same;

the trees have turned the same

resplendent gold,
     but the veined and crispèd leaves
     are not the same here
     as they are hither and yon.
The same moon goes new to gibbous
    here, and then full to gibbous again
     until there is no moon above us,

dark here, dark hither, dark yon.

Not one of us can reach out to touch
from our closed rooms the same dawn.

We will shiver a common winter.
We will sleep singly, or not at all,
wasting with pent-up longing.

In sad fact, not one of us
shall ever see the other again.

1973, rev. 2019

The Daemon Leads Me On

by Brett Rutherford

Greece, when thy fleet-footed Hermes graced
my adolescence with the poet’s tongue,
when eyes conceived of impossible art
and the sightless, deaf and immutable
logic of words first sprung to my grasp;
even when music burst upon me —
in all that beauteous conception
no word or chord attained this pitch
where now I lie.

Earth, now that your dew-time’s herald larks
have urged the hesitant spring of the sun,
I wake to hold one, new to my arms
as our restless and irrefutable
tokens of lips, caresses and sighs
carry us over the cavernous edge
of frozen sea.

Thanos, when thy hungry gravebed takes
my poems, and this human eye
grows black with dreaming and weeping
     for art,
and a carpet of green and spurious twigs
drains my old cells in bloodless symmetry,
will this love be coin enough for the boatman?
will whom I loved suffice to keep my name
and poems read?

Hermes has been my guide.
I know nothing of grace or immortality.
The god of sudden inspiration
is my daemon, and I must pay him
by being buffeted this way, that way,
one step ahead of the landlord,
at odds with order and decency until I am 
of words bereft.

(This trifle existed in an almost inarticulate version in my 1973 book, The Pumpkined Heart. It makes a little more sense in this version.)

1796 Edinboro Lake

by Brett Rutherford

Off the Venango path and north
of the place called Cussewago, they found  (1)
the uninhabited lake. What did it look like then?
Crammed to its edge with ancient trees
a woods in perpetual dusk where one
could walk for three days before
another cabin smoked out in a clearing.
Here and there along the way
some rotted, roofless ruin lay
where an Erie long-house had been,
or a mound mysterious full of arrow-heads,
a place whose people had vanished,
driven by the Canada’s enraged Hurons
into extinction. No more Eries, no more
this lake a place of winter refuge.
It was empty, and waiting.

So why not claim it? Why not this lake,
so like the lochs of Scotland, why not
this man, John Culberston, Scot-born
but free? From Philadelphia west
he had come; he had weathered out
that Britain-versus-America problem
and it was time to put down roots.
Why not this kettle lake, carved out
of the underlying rock by the glaciers?
The Indian, a Mingo, had told him
about this place, and called it
Conneautee. So here it was,
just as the guide had promised,
a placid little loch just half a mile
across, with pines enough around
to build a town, flat land for grain,
and for the grist mill he would build;
for grain and whisley were the way
to wealth. “What think
you, wife?” he asked his silent consort.

Jeanette took in the sweep of clouds,
the sky-enfolding blue waters, watched
as a flock of crows cawed and winged
welcome. “I like it,” she said.
The half-naked Indian grunted.
If he knew more about the place,
he said nothing. The dark swamp
nearby was well concealed by trees
and the nodding cat-tails. (No need
to upset them about what lived there
and how no one slept well
on certain nights when sorrow
rose like a beast from the bottom!)
Man, woman, horses and wagon
stood for a long time, the little clouds
of their breathing in chill air
as calm as a peace pipe.
Everything they owned,
     they had dragged here.

Down at the lake-edge
their shiny boots ground
time-worn gravel beneath them.
They knew nothing of Ice Ages,
departing glaciers and porous
limestone. They did not know
how shallow the soil was, how brief
the growing season, how deep
the snows piled on in winter,
a place where frost came in August
and snow remained till May.

Still, nothing could be worse
than Scotland: this they would say

on all the winter nights to come.

They canoed to the north, reed grass
and full of inlets, fish abounding,
fens buried in mists, tall pines bent
and fallen to the earth. Something
had walked here unhappily, storms
called down in its anger. Pray
that its time has come and gone!

Pools dank with toads alternated
with blue patches herons favored.
Fog started there, it seemed.
The dusk-mist that rose
around them thickened.
Only the warm spot of sunglow
guided them back again.

And then they found the creek,
the lake’s shallow outlet,
good land on either side
for houses, a place to dam up
and run his mill. All good,
it seemed. “This is home,”
he said to his wife, “now
and for all the time we have left.”

“There’s no church,” she worried.
“Oh that will come,” he answered.
“There will be no stopping them.”
“What shall we call the place?”
“Edinburgh.” He said. “The only city
worth its name in all of Scotland.”

The sun set, the swamp exhaled
its methane-rich vapors, the frogs
began their melancholy chorus.
Back at the lake-edge vantage,
they made their tent, their fire
the first that the land had seen
in over a hundred years.

They did not dream that night,
but something in and under them
dreamt of their lives and deaths,
their burials on this very ground,
the slow seep of waters upwards,
an inverse sun rising
in the names of their children to come.
______

Note 1: Cussewago was the Indian name for Meadville, PA.

1973, rev. December 2019, Rev April 2020

The Shipping On The Styx Now Available

Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988) was called “the Sybil of Greenwich Village,” for her sometimes eerie presence and her incantatory readings. By 1970, she had published her work in over 700 magazines, and had read her work everywhere a poet could read. After seeing several small chapbooks published, Holland decided it was time to tackle the big New York publishers. The Shipping on the Styx, recently rediscovered in the poet’s papers, was rejected by all the publishing houses by the end of 1972. What would have been her “breakthrough” book is finally presented here. Its three parts include a solitary observer’s impressions of bustling New York harbor; a medley of her Manhattan-based poems that she read in coffeehouses; and her blistering and unforgettable Gothic poem, “Black Sabbath.”

Rounding out this volume is Songs of Light and Darkness, a manuscript that probably dates to 1951, the end-point of Holland’s graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. These poems show the poet embarking on her career as a devotee of the work of T. S. Eliot and, perhaps, of Thomas Hardy. Pre-dating her “New York style,” this never-before-seen glimpse at the early Holland is a revelation. This is the 259th publication of The Poet’s Press.

Published December 2019. 110 pages, 6 x 9 inches. ISBN 9781679125287. $12.95 from Amazon. PDF Ebook to be published at a later date.

The Serpent's Story, by Leonid Andreyev

— Adapted by Brett Rutherford from a 1917 translation by Herman Bernstein
from the collection, The Crushed Flower.

SILENCE! Silence! Silence! Come closer to me. Look into my eyes! Always was I a fascinating creature, tender, sensitive, and grateful. I was wise, and I was noble. And I am so flexible in the writhing of my graceful body that it will afford you joy to watch my easy dance. Now I shall coil up into a ring, flash my scales dimly, wind myself around tenderly and clasp my steel body in my own gentle, cold embraces. One in many! One in many!

Be still! Be still! Look into my eyes!

So you do not like my writhing, and my straight, open look! Oh, my head is heavy — therefore I sway about so quietly. Oh, my head is heavy — therefore I look so straight ahead, as I sway about. Come closer to me. Give me a little warmth; stroke my wise forehead with your fingers; in its fine outlines yon will find the form of a cup into which flows wisdom, the dew of the evening flowers. When I draw the air by my writhing, a trace is left in it — the design of the finest of webs, the web of dream-charms, the enchantment of noiseless movements, the inaudible hiss of gliding lines. I am silent and I sway myself. I look ahead and I sway myself. What strange burden am I carrying on my neck?

I love you.

Always was I a fascinating creature, and loved tenderly those whom I loved. Come closer to me. Do you see my white, sharp, enchanting little teeth? Kissing, I used to bite. Not painfully, no — just a trifle. Caressing tenderly, I used to bite a little, until the first bright little drops appeared, until a cry came forth which sounded like the laugh produced by tickling. That was very pleasant — think not it was unpleasant; otherwise they whom I kissed would not come back for more. It is only now that I can kiss only once — how sad — only once! One kiss for each I love — how little for a loving heart, for a sensitive soul, striving for a great union! But it is only I, the sad one, who kiss but once, and must seek love again — he knows no other love any more, to whom my one, tender, nuptial kiss is inviolable and eternal. I am speaking to you frankly; and when my story is ended — I will kiss you.

See how I love you.

Look into my eyes. Is it not true that mine is a magnificent, a powerful look? A firm look and a straight look? And it is steadfast, like steel forced against your heart. I look ahead and sway myself, I look and I enchant; in my green eyes I gather your fear, your loving, fatigued, submissive longing. Come closer to me. Now I am a queen and you dare not fail to see my beauty; but there was a strange time — Ah, what a strange time! Ah, what a strange time! At the mere recollection I am agitated — Ah what a strange time! No one loved me. No one respected me. I was persecuted with cruel ferocity, trampled in the mud and jeered — Ah, what a strange time it was! Sway, sway, one in many! One in many!

I say to you: Come closer to me.

Those others — why did they not love me? Back then, I was also a fascinating creature, but without malice; I was gentle and I danced wonderfully. But they tortured me. They burnt me with fire. Heavy and coarse beasts trampled upon me with the dull steps of terribly heavy feet; cold tusks of bloody mouths tore my tender body — and in my powerless sorrow I bit the sand, I swallowed the dust of the ground — I was always dying of despair. Crushed, I was dying every day. Every day I was dying of despair. Oh, what a terrible time that was! The stupid forest has forgotten everything  — it does not remember that time, but you have pity on me. Come closer to me. Have pity on me, on the offended, on the sad one, on the loving one, on the one who dances so beautifully.

Sadly, I love you.

How could I defend myself? I had only my white, wonderful, sharp little teeth — they were good only for kisses. How could I defend myself? It is only now that I carry on my neck this terrible burden of a head, and my look is commanding and straight, but then my head was light and my eyes gazed meekly. That was before I had poison. Oh, my head is so heavy und it is hard for me to hold it up! Oh, I have grown tired of my look — two stones are in my forehead, and these are my eyes. Perhaps the glittering stones are precious — but it is hard to carry them instead of gentle eyes — they oppress my brain. It is so hard for my head! I look ahead and sway myself; I see you in a green mist — you are so far away. So, come closer to me.

You see, even in sorrow I am beautiful, and my look is languid because of my love. Look into my pupil; I will narrow and widen it, and give it a peculiar glitter — the twinkling of a star at night, the playfulness of all precious stones — of diamonds, of green emeralds, of yellowish topaz, of blood-red rubies. Look into my eyes: It is I, the queen — I am crowning myself, and that which is glittering, burning and glowing — that which robs you of your reason, your freedom and your life — it is poison. It is a drop of my poison.

How has it happened? I do not know. I did not bear ill-will to the living.

I lived and suffered. I was silent. I languished. I hid myself hurriedly when I could hide myself; I crawled away hastily. But they have never seen me weep — I cannot weep; and my easy dance grew ever faster and ever more beautiful. Alone in the stillness, alone in the thicket, I danced with sorrow in my heart  — they despised my swift dance and would have been glad to kill me as I danced. Suddenly my head began to grow heavy — How strange it is! — My head grew heavy. Just as small and beautiful, just as wise and beautiful, it had suddenly grown terribly heavy; it bent my neck to the ground, and caused me pain. Now I am somewhat used to it, but at first it was dreadfully awkward and painful. I thought I was sick.

And suddenly ... Come closer to me. Look into my eyes. Be still! Be still! Be still!

And suddenly my look became heavy — it became fixed and strange — I even frightened myself! I want to glance and turn away — but cannot. I always look straight ahead, I pierce with my eyes ever more deeply, I am as though petrified. Look into my eyes. It is as though I am astonished, turned-to-stone, petrified, as though everything I look upon is petrified. Look into my eyes.

I am not stone: I love you. Do not laugh at my frank story, or I shall be angry. Every hour I open my sensitive heart, for all my efforts are in vain — I am alone. My one and last kiss is full of ringing sorrow — and the one I love is not here, and I seek love again, and I tell my tale in vain — my heart cannot bare itself, and the poison torments me and my head grows heavier. Am I not beautiful in my despair? Come closer to me.

Closer, because I love you.

Once I was bathing in a stagnant swamp in the forest — I love to be clean — it is a sign of noble birth, and I bathe frequently. While bathing, dancing in the water, I saw my reflection, and as always, fell in love with myself. I am so fond of the beautiful and the wise! And suddenly I saw — on my forehead, among my other inborn adornments, a new. strange sign — Was it not this sign that has brought the heaviness, the petrified look, and the sweet taste in my mouth? Here a cross is darkly outlined on my forehead — right here — look. A cross! Come closer to me. Is this not strange? But I did not understand it at that time, and I liked it. Let there be no more adornment. And on the same day, on that same terrible day, when the cross appeared, my first kiss became also my last — my kiss became fatal. One in many! One in many!

Oh!

You cherish precious stones (I know you do) but think, my beloved, how far more precious is a little drop of my poison. It is such a little drop. — Have you ever seen it? Never, never. But you shall find it out. Consider, my beloved, how much suffering, painful humiliation, powerless rage devoured me: how much I had to experience in order to bring forth this little drop. I am a queen! I am a queen! In one drop, brought forth all by myself, I carry death unto the living, and my kingdom is limitless, even as grief is limitless, even as death is limitless. I am queen! My look is inexorable. My dance is terrible! I am beautiful! One in many! One in many!

Oh!

Do not be faint. My story is not quite done. Come closer.

So then I crawled into the stupid forest, into my green dominion.

Now it is a new way, a terrible way! I was kind like a queen; and like a queen I bowed graciously to the right and to the left. And they — they ran away! Like a queen I bowed benevolently to the right and to the left — and they, queer people — they ran away. What do you think? Why did they run away?

What do you think? Look into my eyes. Do you see in them a certain glimmer and a flash? The rays of my crown blind your eyes, you are petrified, you are lost. I shall soon dance my last dance — do not fall back. I shall coil into rings, I shall flash my scales dimly, and I shall clasp my steel body in my own gentle, cold embraces. Here I am! Accept my only kiss, my nuptial kiss — in it is the deadly grief of all oppressed lives. One in many! One in many!

Bend down to me. I love you.

Die!

—From the new Yogh & Thorn/Poet's Press edition, 

Two Russian Exiles: Selected Fiction 

of Mihail Artsybashev and Leonid Andreyev.