Summer of 1967: Cleveland, Ohio

by Brett Rutherford

Cityscape to townscape

   Concrete to clapboard

      Cleveland to nameless tree-

         lined hydrant peppered

            dogwalk

Streets seen from the blur of bus yet

   slowing, limning in slant

      of afternoon for me

twenty years old on my first journey West,
Walt Whitman’s poetry open on my lap,
atop it the journal I am writing in

         this slice of nation:

The lonely boy on the porch

   this Ohio summer of '67

      looks up, sees me

         seeing him, writing

            him here on this page —

perched on this pile of Whitman,

   Connecticut Yankee, damnable

      Moby Dick (my transcon-

      tinental shelf of books)

And old Walt said: look at him.

   A long red light permitting, I looked.

   He smiled, not as if at any one

   of the tinted faces of dusty green

   Grey-monoxide-hound,  but at me —

he regarded me as intently as I, him —

And Walt whispered:
There are wonderful secrets everywhere,

and one of them is that you and he are a poem.

      Sidewalk — a boy and a girl

      wave to the porch boy      he waves

      distractedly, still looking at me,
my eye locks on him as my pen
scribbles on, robotically.

My pen hand  begins to tremble.
Oh, this moment, Walt!

Would that I stopped and had spoken to you,

blond Ohio, I think I might have loved you,

   and you as well might have loved me —

I saw nothing else and hills

   turned to plains,

   to seas of swept green,

saw only eyes and a tousled-haired

   boy head blue-eyed with parted lips
asking my name and are we a poem?

And would I not later find

that there are always eyes

that flash and promise everything,
and that I must do the same in return,
whatever the cost —

   at forty miles an hour and the states

   still whisking by, I am still thinking of him.

I marvel, but Walt has taught me well
already, that one can love so much
and be loved in an instant
of recognition.

Was he merely beautiful,

this never-forgotten fleeting one?
Or has he remembered the fire
of one glance that led him to books,
to a world beyond the lake-front porch?

And if the War did not come and take him,
did he not walk too with the good gray Poet
and make his way West to glory?

The Agony of Orchids

by Brett Rutherford

What can they mean to you,

this line of courtiers?

Why do they come and go
as though they had keys
of their own to your dwelling?

Do they not blush when they pass
one another in the stairwell?

So much simpler, so free
of collisions is our pact
of mutual avoidance!

There floats another
in the nearby lagoon;
I hear tell of a self-hanging.

I leave to them the horror
of loving you

(they warm you
against the night-black chill
that is our greater love);

to them, the pain
of your gay dismissal,

to them,  the anguish
     of your pearly laugh,

the agony of orchids
     you cultivate
     to bloom from suicides;

I leave to them

     the only fit reward

     for loving you —

a Carnival death,
knives drawn
     by unknown strangers
all with the same face,
identical daggers
thrust from gloved hands
in a whirl of black dominos.

I watch, I count,
I bide my time.

—1968/1979/19985, rev 2020

Things Done in Cities

by Brett Rutherford

My Hudson-cliff view from Weehawken
does not efface the smear of it,
Manhattan clogged in its own soot,
the river gray-black with sinister flotsam.
The shade of sycamores and elms,
the brace of breeze and lambent sun,
the promise of golden reflections
if we wait for sunset — these things
cannot negate my friend Boria's lament:

"Peaceful from here, a birdflight
removed, a squint of street.
But still, the thought of the prostitutes,
the gaudy porno shops,
the thought of what might touch you
if you walked along Forty-Second Street.
How have we grown so base?"

I need but close my eyes
to remember slick Dimitrios
and his harem of underage
no-names, and how he sold
his brother's son to slavers
under the eyes of the officers.

Where?
On the steps of the Parthenon.
And when?
Just twenty-three times
a hundred years ago.

Weehawken NJ, Oct 2, 1982, rev. 2020

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