They Closed His Eyes

by Brett Rutherford

     after Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

I went to visit a dying friend,
for one last time. His eyes
were open. I took his bony hand
and pressed it. His fingers clutched
at life, and he gasped a name
(not mine) and said, "I always
loved you best of all." I lied,
and said I loved him equally.

No mother, brother, lover, son,
no sister, cousin or father
came to stand by as the tubes
were removed, the machine
silenced and wheeled away.

They closed his eyes
that were open still
and wanted to be open
still for the coming sunrise
mirror red on the East River.
They hid his face
with a white linen.

And out of nowhere
anonymous mourners came,
some sobbing, some silent.
They come each day, I am told,
and they come for everyone
who has no one. They stood
as the bed frame was dropped
and the wheeled death-cart
was moved to its side.
From the sad sickroom,
they moved away like shadows
and vanished in the corridor.

In a dish, the night candle
burned on a low table.
It cast on the wall
the deathbed's outline,
and in that shadow
the sharp lines
of his wasted body.

The dawn appeared
pearl white and then ruby red.
With a thousand noises
the city exploded to life:
horns, sirens, jackhammers
and the mournful hum
of traffic far below.
As ordinary light
cascaded into the death-room,
I thought a moment:

How much more lonely than we
are the newly-dead!

On the shoulders of men
who did not know his name,
gloved and face-masked
against the feared contagion
they bore him away
and in a chapel left
the freshly-wrapped body
on a plywood bier.
A number was stenciled there.
Then others surrounded
his pale body
with yellow candles
and things of black crèpe
disposable grief that had
no shape but the wing-edge
of a dusty raven, no use
except to fill the space
between the corpse
and the imaginary public.

No one came. Well, almost
no one: a bag lady crone
put down her burden and knelt,
mumbled some prayers
and shuffled off. She crossed
the narrow nave. Door moaned,
opened without a hand
upon it to let her out.
The holy place was quiet,
a cell of silence as a barrage
of taxi hails and basketball
court echoes filtered in
through a broken window.
One pigeon fluttered in,
cooed disapproving
that it was not a rice-wedding
then flapped away.

I was directed there.
Some hours had passed.
I stood alone, or nearly so.
A young priest approached,
saw who and what was there
to be blessed and buried,
covered his face,
and hurried away.
My ears reached out
until I could hear
the chapel's one clock
in measured ticking.
A bank of candles
to one side of the nave
took to guttering
at the same beat
as my own breathing.

All things here
were so dark and mournful,
rigid and cold,
not even a tear was welcome,
and I thought for a moment:

How much more lonely than we
are the newly-dead!

Should there not be
a legion of mourners?
Should he not be
where all who knew him
could gather and mourn?
I imagine the high belfry
of his New England town,
the iron tongue clanging
of the funeral bells,
mournful in last farewell.
Veils and black suits,
eyes cast down in grief,
his friends and relatives
passed in a line and shook
each other's hands, and hugged.

And in that high place
in the old family's last vault,
dark and narrow,
crowded with his ancestors,
the crowbar opened
a niche at one end,
and they laid him away there,
then sealed it up
amid a hecatomb of camellias.
Newspapers would show
the memorial plaque;
friends would come annually.

But this was not to be.
New England paid no dues
to a death in New York,
a death of that kind among
those kinds of people.

The body, on its plywood
plinth, would go instead
into a plywood casket,
then onto a barge,
with hundreds of like kind,
piled high and hauled across
to the Potter's Field
on desolate Hart Island.

Pick-axe on shoulder,
the convict gravedigger,
cursing his lot in dawn-fog,
stood on a mound. His box,
among many other
numbered boxes, dropped
into a numbered plot.

Not a word was said,
not even a prayer.

It was silent. Only now,
after years of dream-dread
can I see it: headlong,
crooked, piled one
upon another at crazy angles,
a quilt of coffins, at last
death's final suffocation
into a nameless grave.

And I sit up in my bed
and think:

How much more lonely than we
are the unmarked dead!

On winter nights
in bitter darkness,
when wind makes
the rafters chatter,
when whipped rain
lashes the window panes,
in such a lonely time
I remember my poor friend,
and the nameless dead
heaped up with him:
how many had I touched?
how many had touched me?

There on Hart Island,
in the pit full of brother-souls,
do they hear the rain
with its same yet ever-
changing monody?
Do they hear the winds'
stern fights across the bay,
the tug boats, the fog-horns,
the sway-song of tides buoyed
by the revolving moon?
Do their bones freeze
with the cold of winter?

Does dust to dust return?
Do souls abandoned by earth
have any place in any heaven?
Or is it all the rot of matter,
organic filthiness and worms?

I do not know. I tramp most
graveyards merrily. I am not
a morose or gloomy soul, and yet,

something there is — something
that treads behind my nights
with loathing and terror.

City of a billion lights, city
of symphonies and towers
aspiring to Promethean heights:
how did a hundred thousand souls
perish in your averted gaze?
A hundred thousand brother-dead
I cannot begin to mourn and cannot
even count.

How much more lonely than we
are the hundred thousand dead
who have gone on without us?

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), a Spanish poet from Seville, influenced by E.T.A Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine, wrote an elegiac poem titled "They Closed Her Eyes." I have gender-changed, "written over," and expanded upon his poem for this work, which is in memory of the 100,000 fatalities from HIV in New York during the 1980s, specifically those who wound up in Potter's Field because no family would claim their bodies.

The Mattress, Vertical

Photo by Tony Buba, 2020. Used with permission.

by Brett Rutherford

after a photo by Tony Buba


The mattress, vertical,
sleeps none.
Sleepers and dogs
and cats, flakes
of dry skin and dust mites,
a slurry of cracker crumbs
and the sighs of forgotten
orgasms, have sloughed away
into the hungry soil
of the abandoned weedlot.

The mattress, vertical,
more like a tombstone
than a nuptial platform,
dimpled with stitching,
dappled with silhouette
of starving tree-scape,
is hungry for occupants,
makes do with shadows —

a traffic cone considers
a rest, inscribes a "V",
then an inverted signature,
as if to stake a claim.
The photographer, retired,
just comes up short
of putting his outline there.
He hesitates; he's nearly
always sleepy this time of day.
One step forward, one
step back, he hesitates.

No one would notice
if he reclined a while,
just thirty minutes until he'd
be as good as new. But no:
the thought of bedbugs,
hands reaching for his camera,
the curiosity of skunk and badger.

Better to let
a mattress, vertical
go on about
its very important business.
Whatever that is.

Ode 2: The Thunderstorm (1968)

by Brett Rutherford

We were alone, slum-student-
house apartment, windows agape
into a rainstorm,

hot summer viewed as multiples

through fly-eyed screens, each eye-spread
alike intoning solitude, pinpoints of night,
scattered and re-assembled.

Impossibilities abroad,
walk on the howling wind,

invisibly strut
between the streetlight cycles,
translate through mesh as spectral whirl,
their passing marked by sourceless rings
spun out on pools of rain.

Across the square,
someone else’s windows

spill out blackness,

a tumbling emptiness

where lights had been.
Have they gone to sleep
or do they reach for one
another over there, in

blundering lust? Does someone
over there moan, “Please!”
and the other cries, “Yes”?

Or does another solitude therein,
sigh and partake

of yearning night? For after all,
what is a storm but electrical
attraction gone mad? Most
creatures hide from a tempest,
and he who hides, trembles
alone in the dark.

Two in an arm-chair,

we lean and look

at the gaping empty
mouths of storefronts,
a neon flicker, failing,
from the Hotel Bar.

High-minded, we
ridicule the passions,

pretending my hand that touches your arm
is not and does not what it seems

but is a mere acting-out
of the diamond-spun

songs from a phonograph.

I share

the singer’s illusion, loss, and hope,
the stuff of blues and Broadway.
The songs are never true; they are
always and ever about the thing
you want, but cannot have.

I on the verge of dangerous descent,
gulp in a breath of cynic air,

but what I draw, what sifts
through the wind-tattered
screen, belies the song,
is love.

Later, I find you, already asleep
(or feigning sleep), the half-bed
moon-dark inviting me.

I hold you, warmed by your heat,
blessed by my storm-wrought hope,

while in the next room

two lovers sweat obliviously.
(They have abandoned themselves,
but neither you nor I can
surrender to this moment.)

So I, poised where our bodies touch
lay dreamless, feeling you breathe,
you, in wanting and terror, feel
my breath and pulse and wanting.

Dawn finds me at the lakeside bench
accusing the sun and sparrow flight

for ending my happiness.
You were still sleeping; perhaps
you only think you dreamt of me.

If only your dreaming self

could wed my waking madness!

 --Edinboro, PA, 1968, Revised February 2020

When It Rains, It Rains Financiers

by Brett Rutherford

Published as "Quand Il Pleut, Il Pleut des Financiers"

after Magritte's painting, "Golconde"

America, awake! Last night Connecticut
suffered a fall of financiers, precipitate
from aerial fleets unseen and traceable
to nowhere on or in the globe.
At dawn a gray cascade
of overcoats and bowler hats
commenced, each agent replete
with tie and unscuffed shoes,
each with a grim and businesslike

demeanor —  a few, with executive
gray sideburns, clasped briefs
full of significant business plans
and letters of unlimited credit.

Only a few insomniacs
witnessed this chute des etrangers,
silent as dew and just as discreet,
without a flutter of parachute,
without a crease in the perfect lawns.
The anti-Newtonian host
walked with deliberate speed
to the waiting commuter trains
from whence they vanished
unnoticed into Wall Street,
courthouse and brokerage,
library and chapel, gone —  
gone and never seen again!

Imposters! Who knows what plots
they hatched in their resemblance
to no one at all! Within days the banks
were belching loans; the wives at home
had well-dressed afternoon lovers;
dogs stood confused at whom to heel
or whom to bar from the kitchen door.

The birth rate rose astonishingly,
as featureless babies that refused to cry
swamped the suburban nurseries.

And this was just the start: the cloud
that made them was but a wisp
of a much larger storm, forging
its turgid thunder into an army
of Nobodies, incurable bores
intent on crowding out everyone
who’s read a book or has an opinion.
Their secret handshakes and nods,
the curious little lapel pins
that your eyes can’t focus on,
the sinister stripes on their ties
not corresponding to any known school
or regiment; the half-wink
they seem to use to greet one another,
smirking at others’ exclusion:

these were the symptoms, alien
and alienating. There were more
like them with each passing month.
The “suits,”
as they called themselves, were here to stay.
As for the rest of us, we
were merged and acquired,
outsourced, down-sized,
shown to the door by security,
Romneyed and pension-plundered,
rezoned, foreclosed,
eminent-domained, evicted,
bankrupted and down-debited,
rust belt trailer park shantied –

just as it was planned
in their spreadsheets,
forecast in their Powerpoint
laptop cellphone wireless
global master plan.

We were only here
to serve the Nobodies
on their road to acquiring
Absolutely Everything.

In the Ghoul-Haunted Woodland

by Brett Rutherford

It is not difficult to write rhymed verse, once one has read a lot of it. I destroyed all my semi-suicidal juvenilia, but sometime around 1990, these lines came back into my memory -- almost all of a poem I had written while I was a sophomore in high school. It is "Ulalume," of course, with a little Lovecraft added. The last stanza would not come back to me in full, but the final lines are, I, think awfully good. There are are few good lines along the way, and I am sure that my adult consciousness made a few of the stanzas better than the lost original. It is offered her for the fun of it, and it probably would red well out loud. 
Curiously, I can remember standing alone in a classroom after school, because I did not want to go home, thinking, not of poetry, but of the main theme from the third movement of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. The rhythm of the poem comes from that music, which has nothing whatever supernatural about it. One cannot account for how things fit together in the mind of a young man who has read Poe.

I can count on a little more than one hand the number of my rhymed poems (one in elegiac stanzas I like a lot), but I am firmly again rhyme 99% of the time.

Here goes:

Upon that plain of fancied dreams

     where I have nightly wandered,

beneath the willows of my tears, I chanced,

     and paused, and pondered.

The moon, a luminescent orb,

     rose high above the trees:

the willows wept, the silence crept,

     bestilled the very breeze.

The moon I saw was pale and white,

     but yet, a tinge of bronze,

an umber crown, an aura’d sphere,

     spun gold upon the lawns.

I came with dread into this wood,

     I came with dark defeat;

I walked with blasted hope amid

     the Eclipse of Love’s heat.

Dead! dead! the eyes that answered mine

     with velvet promise under

stars that laughed and spelled one name,

     then tore our love asunder.

Tonight there is no constancy of sun,

     no orbit free of shade —

each screaming world falls one by one

     into the dark it made!

Black stars in blacker clouds now rise

     above the cypress grove;

black thoughts within your sepulchre

     that summon and reprove

my days of solitude and gloomy verse,

     my nights of vigil at your side,

my pleas to nonexistent gods

     that Love would triumph and abide.

Some creature of the Nocturne, from some

     timeless, shadowed land,

climbed down from out the treetops

     in the heights before my hand,

came down before my startled view

     and thereupon took rest —

in awe I waited, watched, and put my

     saneness to the test…

Its face was cold and black, and frozen

     like the stars

and yet its eyes—if eyes they were—

     were streaked with flaming bars...

Its breath seeped out, enveloped me,

     a wave of rank decay,

my hurried blood ran rampant

     to the echoes of dismay...

I turned to flee this haunted wood …

A limb or claw, an arm or hand,

     whatever tool of hell,

reached out and pulled me firmly back —

     I stumbled and I fell!

In the Forest of the Wendigo

Barbara A. Holland and I both wrote poems about The Wendigo, the terrifying wind elemental known to all the Native Americans from Canada all the way down through Pennsylvania and Ohio. In Holland's notebooks, amid sketches for her Wendigo poems, I found three short poems in which expressed her profound fear of the American woods. I revised them slightly and combined them into this little suite.

IN THE FOREST OF THE WENDIGO

by Barbara A. Holland

1. LOST

The long-house has wandered off
somewhere and I am left behind
to find it. The stars stick in the branches
of the highest trees that have no green
save at the top of the naked trunks.

Beneath the slip-slide footing
of pine needles, something way down
rumbles and shakes the ground
with muttering scarce-heard. I feel it
in my bones. I wonder
if on some far-off island
they are dying, or shouts
of warning rise to the clouds.

The web of a spider
burns my face. Whiskers
of fog feel out for me.

2. THE SECRET

A glade. An opening in the woods
where anything might happen.
Now the forest wakes. The grasses
cease to move. The bushes liberate
their hoarded twittering. The bull frogs
stop their vocalise, but yet
the moss invites me a lie down,
while the trees part in anticipation
of I know not what.
                                     I run and run
until I am exhausted. The forest
can keep its secret.
I shall not intrude on what
it may or may not foster.

3. IN THE DEEP WOODS

When I hear the ground
crunching followed by the sound
of bells, I know that he
is nor far off, that monstrous, tall
hunter in whose ear Hiawatha
rode; that behind a clump of trees
his laughter wobbles the juniper
and soars to a mighty screech,

that I had best be going home.
I do not care to have him
swing downward with his tomahawk.

These woods are treacherous
with spirits. I must not look
nor to the right or left but keep on going.
He is laughing
at the death that fouls our waters,
above the earth that is poisoned
     by the same stuff,
giving bad breath to his laughter,
our self-inflicted hatchet-thrust
the destruction of our woods.

The Secret

by Brett Rutherford

Since you had to leave town, I lived
in West Newton with Gertrude and Claudius.
The town hugged two river banks
of the angry, dark Yoghiogheny. Hornets
buzzed on the bridge that divided it.
Trains roared through the middle
of the tiny main street. It was a place
you went when you needed to be
where no one knew your original name
or why you left where you came from,
where a man and a woman could pretend
to be married, and no one asked
for proof on paper. So I was Hamlet,
in teen-boy guise, housed with my mother
and the man who was once an uncle,
now a no-name lord of the manor.
In my basement laboratory I tried
in vain to make alchemical potions
that might turn a grown man to a frog,
or tastelessly poison a chutney jar.
None of my called-down curses ever worked.
The miscreant sat in his TV room at night
watching Gunsmoke and John Wayne westerns.
My mother spawned a daughter, and then
a son as well, while “Uncle” spewed scorn
on my useless, book-centered universe.
He railed against Jews, bragged that the town
would never build a park or a swimming pool
“’cause if we did, the niggers would come.”

I stayed at school as late as I could,
volunteered for anything that kept
my presence from his shadow.
He made me know I was not welcome,
a bookworm boarder to last as long
as the child support payments came
from my silent and absent father,
and after that, “I want you gone.”

The house had one book only
that was not mine: on the dryer,
opposite their bedroom door,
a well-leafed copy of Lady Chatterley’s

Lover that opened instantly
to the sex scenes. My uncle
had used it to seduce my mother,
sweet poison to eye and ear.

I tried to imagine their coupling,
but judging from the contents
of the medicine cabinet, for
hemorrhoids, psoriasis, and
unpronounceable ailments, all
I could picture was something
like a Hammer Films blob
undulating upon a mattress,
as though two pizza slices
had toppled upon one another
inside the melting oven.

The new town
tolerated me. I had Latin at last
to occupy my thoughts,
new streets to haunt,
a vast night gallery
of riverside graves
where I could brood
and plan my escape
or some spectacular
suicide.

When poetry came.
I figured I wouldn’t last
to thirty, anyway.

When summer came
and I could run off
to my grandmother’s house,
a scant five miles
from Scottdale,
the exultation of home
came back to me.

I phoned my friends,
and one by one their mothers
answered and said, “No.
Tim’s not around.” “Dave
won’t be around this summer.”
“Tom is not permitted
to take a phone call right now.”

I never saw my friends again.

Decades – no, a lifetime later,
I hear from an old neighbor,
the Polish girl whose porch
we could see from our kitchen
window. “You were just gone,
she told me. “One day, just gone.
Our parents wouldn’t tell us why
you were gone. Your whole family
just vanished without a word.”

I choked up as she told me,
“We cried forever.”

My mother took up
with my father’s sister’s husband,
and not content to run away,
they wove a story:
that my father and his sister
“did it first.” Incest, that is.

Their proof: a missing condom
that his young daughter and a friend
had blown up as a water balloon
and thrown away in secret;
and the mailman’s account
of seeing someone naked
moving around in the afternoon,
pale skin viewed through panes
of an inner doorway.

So, armed with “They did it first”
and D. H. Lawrence, the furtive nights
and parked-car couplings began.
Two divorces, and the flood
of door-to-door and phone-
to-phone gossiping. Have you heard
about the Rutherford incest?
Brother and sister — the mailman saw
everything. And wasn’t it almost
incest, what the other two did,
a woman and her in-law?

More than four decades later
I came to the town again. The street
of yellow bricks greeted me
with a full rainbow against
the backdrop of nearby hills.

It was just a town. A place
of stately homes, a new library,
a red brick church
my great-grandparents helped build.

I ought to feel happy here.
The graves of my ancestors
are here in their fine plots.
My grandfather had been Burgess,
a great-uncle a financier;
even a Rutherford bookstore once.

Yet I kept looking backwards,
tense at each corner expecting
the crowd with pitchforks,
torches hastily lit to be rid of me.

Who can undo
the evil of false witnessing?
Who can come home
to where they “cried forever?”