Dead of Prose at 29

by Brett Rutherford

 

In memoriam, Stuart Milstein, January 1977, aet. 29)

1

A flash of light in his skull
and the bulb burned out,
the moth whose wingbeat
blinked in his eyes
has fled, the vacancy
of irises draw cold inside,
down veins into his arms.

He had turned his back on poems.
Fiction he would conquer,
and be a critic, too.
The typewriter hummed,
plots cooled, awaiting
a thrust, a denouement,
a theory to end all theories
that did not come.

The inkwell from which
the poems had come
was dry, a broil of verse
on scraps of notepads.

Five days the Muse came by
and knocked, pacing the hall
in fear and jealousy.
What was he doing?
Who did he think he was,
Dostoyevsky? Proust?


She hid on the stairs
when they broke down the door,
her cry a tiny lament
in their more shrill alarm.

Had he written himself to death?
This mortal coil so easily shed,
just after the tender leaves
of his tender book of poems
had broken the soil,
and withered, unnoticed.

Careless, somehow, of risk,
eschewing cures; a secret smile
at abandoned regimens,

he was a backslid vegetarian
inviting the tusks of herbivores;
and, epileptic,
he put aside his medicine.

He courted Death
in haze of Eden lost.
There had been a woman,
a European dark lady,
and all had not gone well.

Alone in Brooklyn at twenty-nine;
the knock at the door
three times,
   the dreaded Guest,
the flash in his brain,
no time to —

Alone in his book
his poems are glass:
inside, his eyes
stare back at me.

What is one to do
at such catastrophe?

His tiny book,
like all others,
is but an Icarus
in sun-fire.

Who reads? Who notices?
Who wants to meet us
because of the words we weave?

2
I was his publisher.
I carry his book about
like a little tombstone.

He was disconsolate
as we walked in Prospect Park
that no one had noticed
the few review copies
he had cajoled me to mail.

"It doesn't help," I told him.
"America hates poetry." —

 "It doesn't help to be Jewish,"
he told me. Naïve, I answered,
"What does that mean? I envy
your being Jewish." — "How envy?" —
"You know who you are. You know
where your ancestors came from.
The rest of us don't even know
where our grandparents came from.
We are mostly barbarians."

He shook his head. I didn't understand
that even poetry could be consigned
to a ghetto, and in our time.

Poets must be made
of stronger stuff.

It is a life that chooses us,
and we must take it
with all its perils and costs.

The Muse is unforgiving,
and as for Prose,
     well, that will never do.


It's almost enough
to get you killed.

 — Written 1/20/1977, expanded and revised 4/24/2020

The Night I Almost Flew

by Brett Rutherford


By water's edge
I tramp compliant grass
into a dancing ring,
sing on the breeze a name
no mouth has uttered here
since the white man came.

In earthward turn of wrist
I thrust an airless wing
against a blast
of the idea of uplift.

In flex of arm, I seem to rise
into the memory of flight —
I have been here before
in childhood levitation,
hand on banister, yet feet
not touching any but the top
and bottom stair-tread —

Blocked at the last by weight,
I sink! The weight of what?
Cloth, shoes, a belt, a watch,
the fear of spectacles
dashed onto the rocks below
should I rise too far and fast.

Must one be naked for this?
To become weightless
is no small matter!

— 1974/ rev 2020

The Overnight Angel

by Brett Rutherford

He followed me home.
He stayed the night.
He left the next morning.
He knows, and I know,
that I will never see him again.
He did everything I wanted.
One time.

If angels are
those radiant ones
who love us unbidden
and justify the ways
of Love
to Solitude,

I know what angels are.

— Jan 1982, rev. 2020

Becoming Invisible

by Brett Rutherford

The price I pay for my poems:
I filter light and air, make
verse of phosphorescent hopes.
From paleness I progress
to full transparency.

I am invisible. Doors close
in my face with no one to hold
them open, feet stamp on mine,
elbows and briefcases jab me.
If I wave, no taxi stops,
or if it stops, another jostles in
to the seat that should have been mine.
Crowds pass me by
without a blink or nod.
Beauty becomes unbearable
to see, now that it's blind
to me. That I, its priest
and celebrant, should be
disbarred!

I leave my poems
where you might find them.
I wait at your kitchen table,
not offered tea, as you read
the newspaper, frown-puzzle
over the Sunday crossword,
then tip my manuscript
into the trash with grocer's ads
and mail-order catalogs.

You do not hear me
breathing; my ache for touch
is more than tracery of ink.
The poem you did not read
is not an artifact or monument.
There is blood inside.
                                                   — Jan. 1982, rev. 2020

What the Sachem's Son Told Me

by Brett Rutherford

"Westward, the packed

wagons, the loaded guns,

the sleep-soft watchfulness,

the hoarded-in dreams

of the White Man, west,

west from sea to great river,

from plain to mountain,

then to the final sea

at world's end.

"They took it all:

the redwood groves,

pan-gold streams,

bottomless wells,

peat-soft soil,

the promised land of

no-questions equality.

For them.

"Sometimes we managed

to curtail their dreams,

cutting them off

at the root of a scalp.

Our arrows vectored down,

our carnage a vortex

of vulture-spin and blood.

The earth drank them;

the sky

consumed their bones.

We kept the iron pots,

the buttons and pretty beads.

Their guns became ours.

"In spite of that,

a thousand nations

became but one. They spoke

no other language but their own.

Our people are penned

in all the waste-places,

roach-motel reservations.

No arrow can stop

the six-wheeled megatrucks;

train track and highway vein

the former wilderness.

"But as for you, poet:
Thank you for coming.

Know that our knives are drawn

and could take you out

in a minute, if so we chose.

But since you greeted us

with words you took

from our own language,

and since you are, like us

of those who walk the dreams

and make them into magic,

we will walk in peace together.

"Walk with me now,

away from the sage-smoke.

I will tell you

that our power is returning,

if we learn to wield it

without the white man's poison

forever weakening.

"I have found something,

a survivor of totem days,

I have a manitou,

cousin of Wendigo, Hudson Bay's

wind-walker, elemental.

Cloud-lurker, he evens

the score. Look up!"

The poet sees, in night sky, but lit

from underneath by earth-light,

an airplane departing

from the nearby airport.

“Watch!” the young Iroquois says.

A dark cloud envelops the DC-10 above.

One wing snaps off, and then

the other. It is all the more

horrible that the screams cannot be heard.

"Hunh!" is all the sachem's son utters.

"It gives me no pleasure.

I would rather the earth swallow them

of its own accord, and spare The People.
Our People, I mean."

"Do work on that," the poet urges.

"The outraged planet listens, I am sure."

A smile creases the cracked corners

of the wizard’s otherwise humorless mouth.

"We will still keep their pots and pans,

the motor-bikes and the pretty beads.

"Come to the pow-wow now

and we'll get plenty drunk, poet!"

— Oct. 1982, rev. 2020.

After the Fugue in B Minor

by Brett Rutherford

You have emerged again from the fugue,

a phantom stepped out of counterpoint, at burst

of ominous pedal point, your ululating step

fringed with chromatics — I thought I had lost

your tenor in all that tumult, or in those rules

that ban our moving in parallel steps

or ever singing in unison,

but there you are, out-of-place,

a metaphor for lutes and panegyric hymns,

my untouched cipher whom I would decorate

with myrtle. Defy, if you dare, this

     separateness

that only a Lutheran cantor could

     want to impose.

Ah, you are gone again. I have lost you.

Our voices never cross; we move in our permitted

range, remotely similar, earthbound alike,

my bass aspiring to your fanciful curves,

you in the middle voice, keyboards above,
I in the plodding pedal, trapped below.

We stay alien as much to one another

as they who soar soprano must seem

to both of us. A fugue has a cruel beauty,

as strict as military order. Meet me here

at midnight, my elusive friend! Do not

fail to appear. The cantor will be asleep,

the minister well into his ale-house slumber.

Just us, and the organist,

in the dark of the moon. The bellows-boy

will be sworn to secrecy, and pump away!

And we, we shall be free to scamper and play,

chase one another and even embrace

in chord after chord, and leaping intervals,

all rules abandoned. A Toccata! A Toccata!