Fragments of Empedocles

 

FRAGMENTS OF EMPEDOCLES

 

Translated by Brett Rutherford

 

11

Fools, whose thoughts run fast and false,
who fancy that from Nothing, Something comes,
or that, with wave of hand, What Is, is Not,
as if a thing once seen, can be unseen.

 

12

From Nothingness a bring can never come;
if so, What Is could just as well be all destroyed,
by what Force by what name no one has heard —
for What Is rests forever where it sits.

The All contains no void, nor has it more
than what itself encompasses.

17

I will report a truth two-fold: I see
the One from Many come to be, and
as the One dissolves, the Many come again:
Earth and Fire, Water and the sky of Air;
and held apart from them, conflicting Force
in balance held, and Love upon them all,
in all her being everywhere the same.

Focus your mind on Love, sit not
like a novice astonished. She exists
inborn in every human cell and not
to be denied. Through her, the yearning comes
of created things for one another; through her
we call a well-done thing a beauty, and know
Delight or even love a thing for its own sake.

 

 

The Last Lesson - A Young Alsatian's Narrative

 

THE LAST LESSON. A YOUNG ALSATIAN'S NARRATIVE.

by Alphonse Daudet, from Monday Tales.

That morning it was quite late before I started for school, and I was terribly afraid I should be scolded, for Monsieur Hamel had told us that he would question us upon participles, and I did not know the first thing about them. For a moment I thought of escaping from school and roving through the fields.

The day was so warm, so clear! The blackbirds were whistling on the outskirts of the woods. In Rippert Meadow, behind the sawmill, the Prussians were drilling. All these things were far more attractive to me than the rule for the use of participles. But I mustered up strength to resist temptation, and hurried on to school.

As I reached the town hall, I saw a group of people ; they loitered before the little grating, reading the placards posted upon it. For two years every bit of bad news had been announced to us from that grating. There we read what battles had been lost, what requisitions made ; there we learned what orders had issued from headquarters. And though I did not pause with the rest, I wondered to myself, “What can be the matter now?”

As I ran across the square, Wachter, the black- smith, who, in company with his apprentice, was absorbed in reading the notice, exclaimed, —

“Not so fast, child! You will reach your school soon enough!”

I believed he was making game of me, and I was quite out of breath when I entered Monsieur Hamel’s small domain.

Now, at the beginning of the session there was usually such an uproar that it could be heard as far as the street. Desks were opened and shut, lessons recited at the top of our voices, all shouting together, each of us stopping his ears that he might hear better. Then the master’s big ruler would descend upon his desk, and he would say, —

“Silence!”

I counted upon making my entrance in the midst of the usual babel and reaching my seat unobserved, but upon this particular morning all was hushed. Sabbath stillness reigned. Through the open window I could see that my comrades had already taken their seats ; I could see Monsieur Hamel himself, passing back and forth, his formidable iron ruler under his arm.

I must open that door. I must enter in the midst of that deep silence. I need not tell you that I grew red in the face, and terror seized me.

But, strangely enough, as Monsieur Hamel scrutinized me, there was no anger in his gaze. He said very gently, —

“Take your seat quickly, my little Franz. We were going to begin without you.”

I climbed over the bench, and seated myself. But when I had recovered a little from my fright, I noticed that our master had donned his beautiful green frock-coat, his finest frilled shirt, and his embroidered black silk calotte, which he wore only on inspection days, or upon those occasions when prizes were distributed. Moreover, an extraordinary solemnity had taken possession of my classmates. But the greatest surprise of all came when my eye fell upon the benches at the farther end of the room. Usually they were empty, but upon this morning the villagers were seated there, solemn as ourselves. There sat old Hauser, with his three-cornered hat, there sat the venerable mayor, the aged carrier, and other personages of importance. All of our visitors seemed sad, and Hauser had brought with him an old primer, chewed at the edges. It lay wide open upon his knees, his big spectacles reposing upon the page.

While I was wondering at all these things. Monsieur Hamel had taken his seat, and in the same grave and gentle tone in which he had greeted me, he said to us, —

“My children, this is the last day I shall teach you. The order has come from Berlin that henceforth in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine all instruction shall be given in the German tongue only. Your new master will arrive to-morrow. To-day you hear the last lesson you will receive in French, and I beg you will be most attentive.”

My “last” French lesson! And I scarcely knew how to write! Now I should never learn. My education must be cut short. How I grudged at that moment every minute I had lost, every lesson I had missed for the sake of hunting birds’ nests or making slides upon the Saar! And those books which a moment before were so dry and dull, so heavy to carry, my grammar, my Bible-history, seemed now to wear the faces of old friends, whom I could not bear to bid farewell. It was with them as with Monsieur Hamel, the thought that he was about to leave, that I should see him no more, made me forget all the blows of his ruler, and the many punishments I had received.

Poor man! It was in honor of that last session that he was arrayed in his finest Sunday garb, and now I began to understand why the villagers had gathered at the back of the class-room. Their presence at such a moment seemed to express a regret that they had not visited that school-room oftener ; it was their way of telling our master they thanked him for his forty years of faithful service, and desired to pay their respects to the land whose empire was departing.

I was busied with these reflections when I heard my name called. It was now my turn to recite. Ah! what would I not have given then, had I been able to repeat from beginning to end that famous rule for the use of participles loudly, distinctly, and without a single mistake ; but I became entangled in the first few words, and remained standing at my seat, swinging from side to side, my heart swelling. I dared not raise my head. Monsieur Hamel was addressing me.

“I shall not chide thee, my little Franz ; thy punishment will be great enough. So it is! We say to ourselves each day, ‘Bah ! I have time enough. I will learn to-morrow.’ And now see what results. Ah, it has ever been the greatest misfortune of our Alsace that she was willing to put off learning till tomorrow ! And now these foreigners can say to us, and justly, ‘What! you profess to be Frenchmen, and can neither speak nor write your own language?’ And in all this, my poor Franz, you are not the chief culprit. Each of us has something to reproach himself with.

“Your parents have not shown enough anxiety about having you educated. They preferred to see you spinning, or tilling the soil, since that brought them in a few more sous. And have I nothing with which to reproach myself? Did I not often send you to water my garden when you should have been at your tasks? And if I myself wished to go trout-fishing, was my conscience in the least disturbed when I gave you a holiday”

One topic leading to another. Monsieur Hamel began to speak of the French language, saying it was the strongest, clearest, most beautiful language in the world, which we must keep as our heritage, never allowing it to be forgotten, telling us that when a nation has become enslaved, she holds the key which shall unlock her prison as long as she preserves her native tongue.

Then he took a grammar, and read our lesson to us, and I was amazed to see how well I understood. Everything he said seemed so very simple, so easy ! I had never, I believe, listened to any one as I listened to him at that moment, and never before had he shown so much patience in his explanations. It really seemed as if the poor man, anxious to impart everything he knew before he took leave of us, desired to strike a single blow that might drive all his knowledge into our heads at once.

The lesson was followed by writing. For this occasion Monsieur Hamel had prepared some copies that were entirely new, and upon these were written in a beautiful round hand, “France, Alsace! France, Alsace !”

These words were as inspiring as the sight of the tiny flags attached to the rod of our desks. It was good to see how each one applied himself, and how silent it was! Not a sound save the scratching of pens as they touched our papers. Once, indeed, some Maybugs entered the room, but no one paid the least attention to them, not even the tiniest pupil ; for the youngest were absorbed in tracing their straight strokes as earnestly and conscientiously as if these too were written in French! On the roof of the schoolhouse the pigeons were cooing softly, and I thought to myself as I listened,

“And must they also be compelled to sing in German?”

From time to time, looking up from my page, I saw Monsieur Hamel, motionless in his chair, his eyes riveted upon each object about him, as if he desired to fix in his mind, and forever, every detail of his little school. Remember that for forty years he had been constantly at his post, in that very school-room, facing the same playground. Little had changed. The desks and benches were polished and worn, through long use; the walnut-trees in the playground had grown taller ; and the hop-vine he himself had planted curled its tendrils about the windows, running even to the roof. What anguish must have filled the poor man’s heart, as he thought of leaving all these things, and heard his sister moving to and fro in the room overhead, busied in fastening their trunks! For on the morrow they were to leave the country, never to return. Nevertheless his courage did not falter; not a single lesson was omitted. After writing came history, and then the little ones sang their “Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu” together. Old Hauser, at the back of the room, had put on his spectacles, and, holding his primer in both hands, was spelling out the letters with the little ones. He too was absorbed in his task ; his voice trembled with emotion, and it was so comical to hear him that we all wanted to laugh and to cry at the same moment. Ah ! never shall I forget that last lesson!

Suddenly the church clock struck twelve, and then the Angelus was heard. At the same moment, a trumpet-blast under our window announced that the Prussians were returning from drill. Monsieur Hamel rose in his chair. He was very pale, but never before had he seemed to me so tall as at that moment.

“My friends — ” he said, “my friends — I — I — ”

But something choked him. He could not finish his sentence.

Then he took a piece of chalk, and grasping it with all his strength, wrote in his largest hand, —  “Vive La France!”

He remained standing at the blackboard, his head resting against the wall. He did not speak again, but a motion of his hand said to us, —

“That is all. You are dismissed.”

 

The Love Spell

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Theocritus, Idyll II 

Dried laurel leaves, where are you? What shelf
did I mark as the place for love-charms? Thestylis,
help me find everything I need! I am not myself;
anger with the wretch who abandoned me
is making me forgetful. Yes, girl, those are the ones
I wanted. Now to girdle my best bronze bowl
with a garland of red amaranth, whose dried blooms
look ever so much like balls of yarn, redder
than blood and softer than love’s surrendering.

 Twelve days the door has been ajar for him,
for slipping in at any time of night —
twelve nights, too, and nothing! For all he knows
I died here in my bed, from wanting him.
Be sure he has not died from wanting me,
for one bird says he is out and about,
sunning himself in a new, blue tunic,

led off by Eros, and where the little
Love points him, boy that he is, he follows.
Can Aphrodite be so far behind,
love’s calendar cancelled by one impulse?

I have a mind to go, disguised, of course,
for I can pass as boy when I need to,
to Timagetus’s wrestling school, where girls
are not permitted (as if that little
fence could prevent my seeing his presence!)
There, right in front of all the oiled athletes
I shall confront and shame the deceiver!
(Or should I not? What good will that do me?)

 But now, tonight, I shall use my powers —
I may not be an adept at witchcraft,
but I learned much from a circle of crones
whose hearths I swept, and at whose knees I sat
to ken birth-secrets, and how to call death
down, and best of all, how to compel men.

 Moon at my window-sill, rising not full
but cusped as sharp as a brazen scythe, shine
me nevertheless in silvery light,
just bright enough that I may enchant thee,
raw moon of infernal Hecate, one
who makes even wild dogs whine and shudder
as you drift freely among the white tombs
and take as you please from the bony dead
whatever tokens of skulls and scraps
your rituals require, who in the dark
supine yourself in awe of greater Darkness —

Hail! from this unworthy acolyte, hail,
O Hecate, Hecate, Hecate!
Be with me this little while as my weak
hands cross and uncross, then blinder my eyes
as I tremble that you bless this love-charm.
Deign, Hecate, to make this spell as strong
as the philtres of seductress Circe,
or that of dread Medea, (as loving
as she was cruel), or strong as the love-spells
of our ancestress, yellow-haired Perimede.

And now I take the sacred iynx in hand,
(five carven birds on a wooden top)
and pull the strings to spin it, and it sings
the chanting of the heart-broken wryneck
as it turns round its head to seek its mate —

Que …. que …. que. Faster, slower, faster,
slower as my hands pull the motor twine.
Que … que … que.
     Spin, five birds, spin.
          Que … que … que.

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

First we must burn some barley-meal. Come on,
Thestylis, attend me and throw it down
until the well-tended fire can char it.
Yes, burn it, burn it, no matter the smoke.
Can you not follow the simplest orders?
You, in your rags, you would smile and mock me?
Just wait till you see the magic outcome.
Now toss them in and say this after me:
May these be the bones of Delphis I hurl.

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

Take in your hand the laurel leaves, and throw
them into the heart of the flame. Just so
they crackle and curl and hiss to nothing,
up in a flare without a trace of ash,
Just so may the limbs of Delphis sting.

 Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

 Take now this doll which I did mold of him,
with hair of his head and seed of his loin
in waxen likeness with my kisses warmed.
Here, take it, girl, and do not shudder so.
On this same grate now let it melt away.
So melt with love, Delphis of Mindus born.

As my hands spin, so do the guiding hands
of Aphrodite, I swear it. Delphis,
return and beg admittance at my door!

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

Laurel, barley, doll and bran, so I recall
in order the ancient women taught me.
Now, slave, a handful of bran to the fire.
Step back, lest it singe your hairy eyebrows.
More! More! See how it takes the form of man,
with arms and legs and flaming hair like his!

O Artemis, this slender moon is yours,
with such a disk more dark than light
you could draw down even adamantine
Hades to do your will. Oh, so much less
I ask of you and Hecate, a boy,
one boy, one will, one love, and forever.

The goddesses hear! Up goes a howling
now from every she-bitch in the city:
from curs and hounds to the long-eared lap-dogs
in the cool, high-walled mansions of the rich.

I can almost see the crossroads. She comes,
surely she comes now to the abhorrent place,
where she will find the daytime offering,
the one I left by a suicide’s grave.

Now beat the pans as loud as possible
to signal her that I, attending her,
should have this one small gift bestowed on me.

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

What? Just Silence? Such silence, absolute,
that not a tree or blade of grass tells me
that Hecate treads the waste-place tonight?
The sea is within my hearing, yet not
a single wave slaps the stone quay, not one
o’erleaps the promenade and washes up
and then back again on the paving stones.
(such sighing we heard each night as the bay
rose and fell in time with our lovemaking).

What? silence now, and mockery to come
when I, who should have been his wedded wife
will now be scorned as an old castaway! 

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

No matter, girl — they are just testing me.
Three times now I offer my libation.
Three times I say these words, great goddesses:

Whatever woman lies beside him now,
or even whatever man, if it has come
to that, may he forget their embraces
as soon as he takes them, oblivious
to them as once great Theseus forgot
his precious Ariadne at Naxos:

In loving me, he shall forget all else.
In loving me, he shall forget all else.
In loving me, he shall forget all else.

 Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

Something there is about that wrestling school
that seems amiss to me: who could resist
strong oil’d limbs and burning male eyes once
they had caught one’s fancy? Not I! Not him,
perhaps? What if the things I did with him,
the joys I learned beneath his embrace,
were already done to him by a man?

Hippomanes I need. Where on the shelf?
A lamp I need, Thestylis, a lamp!
Ah, here! “Colt’s foot” the herb is called
in Arcady, where mare and stallion
go mad for one another on eating it
and make such folly, lust out of season
that would make even fauns and centaurs blush.
Into my fire it goes, so Delphis mad
with animal lust may come to my bed,
and then, forgetting all, forsake the rest.

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

I have the trim I tore from his mantle,
a blue-and-gold souvenir embroidered
with blazing suns. Into the fire it goes,
sun after little blazing sun cindered
to trembling ash. What have I gone and done?
This was the ribbon I kissed each morning
just after he left me, the one I held
upon my lap as I day-dreamed of him.
Now it is gone, and he is gone, and I
have grown pale as though a leech were on me,
as though the sweet Eros had turned vampire
to drink away all the life inside me.

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

Delphis, beware! For I am witch enough
to have found and drained a venomous eft,
cold-blooded thing with adder’s potency,
and I will carry it on my person,
should things not work out between us. But no,
that is the last resort. Now, Thestylis,
we are done with the spell. Take up the bowl
as soon as it is cool enough, and fly
to Delphis’s home, the place I showed you,
and smear those ashes upon his lintel.
Spit once and say, These the bones of Delphis.

She goes, she goes; it is done. How long now
must I keep on with the sacred iynx? —

Birds in a wheel, turn, turn!
Bring the man back to me!
Bring the man back to me!

Que …. que …. que. Slower, faster, slower,
slower as my hands pull the motor twine.
Que … que … que.
     Sleep, five birds, sleep.
          Que …… que …… que.

 

 

Two Poems from the Ancient Greek

 translated by Brett Rutherford

UPON A STATUE OF ANAKREON 

     after Theocritus, Epigram 16

Study this statue carefully, O Stranger,
and when you return home, report of it,
“I saw, at Teos, Anakreon, or
such a likeness of Anakreon, as
though he still lived and breathed, pre-eminent
if ever a man was, among the bards.”

 Add also the thing that no one would know
unless they kenned his words and combed each line
for object and intent: Anakreon
burned for the love of young men of beauty.

 Then, having reported this, be silent.
Now you have told the truth of the whole man.

** ** ** 

FRIENDSHIP 

      after Bion, Idyll 8

Some call it friendship, and some call it more.
Blessed are they who love with fair return.

So blest was Theseus with one great friend,
Pirithous whom he mourned to leave behind
in Hell; so blest was Furied Orestes
when beautiful Pylades held him close
through the night terrors of fear and flight,
who for his high-born friend begged crumbs of bread
among ever-more barbarous strangers;
so blest was Achilles until the day
Patroclus for love assumed his armor
and in Achilles’ place went down to ground.

Deep such love is, and deeper still the grief.

 

Hyllus and the Chariot Driver

 by Brett Rutherford

HYLLUS AND THE CHARIOTEER

Anakreon, to Hyllus:

So last night I followed you, to the foot
of your street, to that Dionysian ruin
where men and youths commingle
’mid broken columns and pedestals.

I saw you there, “virgin” Hyllus
in quadruped surrender
to a popular chariot driver.

I watched and heard it all
from the anonymous shadows:
the brutal, pathetic beauty of it,
the animal moans,
     the false starts,
the invoking of gods,
the simultaneous gasping,
the hurried redress of tunic and belt,
the counting out of three small coins.

Others watched, and saw me watching;
their little nods admonishing me.
I almost laughed at how, departing,
you brushed aside my friend Harmodius,
all too willing to have a go with you,
with that quick and dismissive line:
“Only the hand that has held a whip
can ever hold mine!”

Small wonder that I have never possessed you,
slave as I am of scribbling,
more fond of vowels than hard-edged consonants,
my only rod the stylus. How strange
when beauty seeks not its merited worship,
leaving its pedestal for the dust,
kneeling for the promise of certain pain,
for such a negotiated, small price. 

November Desolation

by Brett Rutherford

My heart is a cenotaph.
My undelivered love notes
go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
where a drab  clerk files them indifferently
in the room where the wilted roses go.

 Why? Because I finally burned your portrait,
consigning frame and glass to the dumpster,
ripping to shreds the returned letter
that had come back four years ago, stamped
Addressee Unknown, not forwarded.

 If I do not think of you before my
sleeping, perhaps you will now shun my dreams.
Go! Forget that you came to me one night
with everything you owned in a suitcase,
and how you stayed, no questions asked, until
my music dispelled your inner darkness,
and how you explained, “I slept-walk, I guess,”
when I once woke to find you beside me.

 Go! Go! and if you circle back again,
I am not so sure I will remember you.
I am getting on, you know, and such rooms
as are full of cobwebs and dried-up lusts
are less appealing now. My cancel stamp
has learned the use of Return to Sender.

The Fence (Anniversarius 26)

 

by Brett Rutherford

Town fathers, what have you done?
Last night I returned
(I vowed — I made the lake a promise)
intending to tramp the lane of maples,
read with my palms the weary tombstones,
feast with my eyes the clouded lake,
lean with a sigh on founder’s headstone,
chatter my verses to turtles and fish,
trace with my pen the day lily runes,
    the wild grape alphabet,
the anagram of fallen branches,
all in a carpet of mottled leaves.
The mute trees were all assembled.
The stones — a little more helter-
    skelter than before,
but more or less intact — still greeted me
as ever with their Braille assertions.
The lake, unbleached solemnity 
    of gray, tipped up
and out against its banks to meet me.
All should have been as I left it.

Heart sinks. The eye recoils.
    My joy becomes an orphanage
    at what I see:
from gate to bank to bend
    of old peninsula,
    across the lot 
    and back again,
sunk into earth
    and seven feet high
A CHAIN LINK FENCE!

Town fathers, what have you done?
Surely the dead do not require protection?

Trees do not walk.
    The birds are not endangered.
How have your grandsires sinned
    to be enclosed in a prison yard?
As I walk in I shudder.
    It is a trap now.
    A cul-de-sac.
I think of concentration camps.

For years, art students painted here —
    I hear the click of camera shutters,
    the scratch of pens,
    the smooth pastel caress,
    taste the tongue lick of water color,
    inhale the night musk of oil paints.
Poets and writers too,
    leaning on death stones
    took ease and inspiration here,
    minds soaring to lake and sky.
At dawn, a solitary fisherman
    could cast his line here.

Some nights the ground would undulate
    with lovers
(what harm? who now would take
    their joy between two fences?)

The fence is everywhere! No angled view
can exclude it. It checkerboards
the lake, the sky, the treeline.

They tell me that vandals rampaged here,
    knocked over stones,
    tossed markers
         into the outraged waves.
Whose adolescents did this,
    town fathers?
                   Yours.
Stunted by rock and stunned by drugs, 
they came to topple a few old slabs,
struck them because they could not 
         strike you.

Let them summon their dusky Devil,
rock lyric and comic and paperback,
blue collar magic, dime store demons —
                    they wait and wait,
blood dripping from dead bird sacrifice
until the heavy truth engages them:

The dead are dead,
    magic is empty ritual,
         and stubborn Satan declines
to answer a teen age telegram.

Fence in your children, not our stones!

— October 25, 1989, Edinboro, Pennsylvania

End of the World (Anniversarius 21)

 

by Brett Rutherford

Not with a trumpet
  but a whisper.  No angels
proclaimed the end. Prophets
with sandwich signs
 did not predict it.
No tea-leaf ladies
  or noted astrologers
knew that the end would come
at half-past eight
  in the morning.

It was a Monday,
  (of all days!)
catching them dressed
for their funerals.

Who would have guessed
that this October,
instead of leaves
the people turned
and blew away,
that gravity,
the faithful plodder,
would take a holiday?

First some commuters
on a platform in Connecticut
fell straight into a cloudless sky
trying to hook
  to lampposts and poles
with flailing arms.

Even the oversize stationmaster
was not immune,
hung by his fingertips
to shingled roof,
an upside-down balloon.
His wig fell down,
the rest of him 
shot shrieking upwards.

Slumlords in Brooklyn
dropped rent receipts,
clutched hearts and wallets
as they exfoliated,
burst into red and umber explosions
and flapped away.

A Senator stepped down
from his bulletproof limo,
waved to the waiting lobbyist,
  (sweaty with suitcase
   full of hundreds)
only to wither to leaf-brown dust,
crumbling within his overcoat.

Stockbrokers adjusted their power ties,
buttoned their monogrammed blazers,
pushed one another from narrow ledge
falling from Wall Street precipice
into the waiting sky,
printouts and ticker tapes,
class rings and credit cards
feathering back down.

Bankers turned yellow,
wisped out like willow leaf
from crumpled pin-stripe,
filling the air
with streamers of vomit
as they passed the roof
of the World Trade Center.

The colors were amazing:
black women turned ivory,
white men turned brown and sere,
athletes swelled up
  to fuchsia puffballs,
Asians unfurled
  to weightless jade umbrellas.

Winds plucked the babies from carriages,
oozed them out of nurseries,
pulled them from delivery rooms,
from the very womb —
gone on the first wind out and upwards.

They filled the stratosphere
darkened the jet stream,
too frail to settle in orbit,
drifting to airless space.

They fell at last into the maw
of the black hole Harvester,
a gibbering god
  who made a bonfire
  of the human host
the whirling spiral of skeletons
a rainbow of dead colors
red and yellow and black and brown
  albino and ivory
parched-leaf skins a naked tumble.

The bare earth sighed.
Pigeons took roost in palaces.
Tree roots began
the penetration of concrete.
Rats walked the noonday market.

Wild dogs patrolled
  the shopping malls.
Wind licked at broken panes.
A corporate logo toppled
  from its ziggurat.
Lightning jabbed down
  at the arrogant churches
  abandoned schools
  mansions unoccupied

started a firestorm
a casual blaze
as unconcerned
as that unfriendly shrug
that cleaned the planet.

 — October 31, 1987, Providence-New York

The State Versus Autumn (Anniversarius 17)

by Brett Rutherford

Resolved: For the sake of decency
and the order of the land,
the Congress hereby abolishes
the unwanted month of October...

No more Octobers ever?
Has the Society to Outlaw Gloom at last
succeeded in the Senate halls?
Has the Lobby Against Dead Leaves
banished arborial pollution?
No trees, no bees, no bugs, no squirrels:
a paradise in the suburbs!

Resolved: That the falling of leaves
disrupts the conduct of business,
distracts our children from their studies,
depresses the widowed and elderly...
We hereby outlaw deciduous trees.

How long, then, till the squad cars come
with their phalanx of armored cops,
handcuffing my corner sycamore,
chainsawing the neighbor’s rowan tree,
tearing the vagrant maple from the street,
screaming with bullhorns for the ailanthus
to disperse from hillsides and parking lots,
interrogating runaway saplings all night,
wresting confessions from an effeminate birch?

The casualties will mount beyond reckoning,
the loss of leaves beyond count,
numbers too large for a superchip
or the chambered cranium of a C.P.A.

It’s a conspiracy, of course:
the Moral Majority, the Vatican,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons,
an arm-in-arm league of Fundamentalists,
their hidden object a simple one:

Outlaw Halloween! They claim
the day is a Communist plot,
a pact of Satan and Hollywood,
Beelzebub and Publishers’ Row,
a turning of innocent youth from God,
an anarchist’s field day,
a sadist’s orgy of pin-filled apples
and candies injected with LSD.

An ominous van passes my house
and returns and passes again
and returns and passes again,
this way, that way, slowing.
A long camera lens points at my window,
scanning my bookshelves, alert
for subversive posters on my walls.
The vehicle's side are painted
GOD, GUNS & TRUMP on one side,
and on the other,

NO MORE DEVIL'S NIGHT:
MAKE JESUS-WEEN A HOLIDAY.

On Halloween, the faithful complain,
you cannot tell who the homosexuals are.
On Halloween, too much of the world
tilts to the literal Devil’s side.
We got to get that Dutch-boy white Jesus
and his lambs, Wise Men and Virgins,
angels and all their kin on the sidewalks,
scarfing up candy so the dusky children
of heathen devils get no handouts ever.

The bill has amendments, of course.
It will be a felony to serve up Poe
to those of tender and gullible age.
Horror books and movies? Goodness, no!
Bradbury’s tales, and Brahms’ autumnal tones,
LeFanu and Bierce, Blackwood and James,
Hawthorne and Derleth, Leiber and Bloch,
a whole amendment proscribing Stephen King,
real or pseudonymous, and prison for life
for reading Lovecraft and his protégés!

And so, a stitch in time is made.
September’s harvest blinks
     to Jesus-Ween
and suddenly it's November
     prelude to winter’s barren hills.

October 1 to October 30 have vanished!
A month of mail will never be delivered.
Today at work, a marshal comes to my desk,
tears page after page from my calendar.

Now someone is blacking out words in the library books.
The date of my birth no longer exists.
There is gunfire outside the library.
All night I smell the paper burning.
As I read my on-line bibliography,
someone is back-space deleting lines
before my very eyes.

These politicians mean business!

 — September 1985/ October 1986, Providence RI/
Revised November 13, 2021.

October Is Coming! (Anniversarius 16)

 

by Brett Rutherford

1

Listen! There is a sudden pause
between my words and the surrounding
silences: no breeze, no hum
of street lamps, no tread of tire —
even the birds have missed a beat.
It is the first self-conscious tinge
of maple leaf red, the first
night-chill of the season.
It is the caesura of equinox —
it whispers a prophecy:
October is coming.

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from the things that bind you.
You will follow a strange wind northward.
You will tread the edge of glaciers
  and blush with the iron tinge of destiny.
You will come to earth in a strange place
where you will be known as a leaf from an alien tree
    and be feared for it,
where you will seek the tongue-touch of another
    rasping exile — and find it.

Not for you the comfort of old trees,
    old branches, old roots — 
now at last the buoyant freedom of the nearly
    weightless,
the eyrie-view above pine-tops, eddied above
    rain troughs and lightning rods,
bird-free,

drifting ghostlike and invisible on graveyard mound,
grazing the cheeks of grievers, pausing
    upon the naked backs of lovers,
tracing the mysterious barricades between 
    the kingdoms of strays,
colliding with children in their chaotic play — 

Hearing at night with brittle ears the plaintive sea,
    the wearing away of shoreline,
the woeful throb of the requiem of whales,
the madrigal of feeding gulls, the thrust beat
    of the albatross in its pinioned flight,
the hideous slurring of squids,
the inexorable gnashing of the machinery of sharks —

Mute, passive, dumb as a dead leaf 
    you shall hear them all —

You shall move among the avalanche of first snow,
amazed at the shattering of perfect ice,
its joyous crystalline tone as it falls,
the utterly new dimension of its remaining,
endlessly crushed and compacted and moved,
singed to a fog and sublimed away
as if it had never been, while you
still lay like an old coat in a hamper —
grayer, crisper, more decrepit than ever.

And you suspect your lingering immortality —
a leaf, a brittle parchment that no one can read,
a shard, a skeleton of cellulose,
a thread, a string, a lichen roost, a bird-nest lining,
a witness of ever-advancing decay and assimilation,
by becoming nothing, becoming everything.

2

Yet this is such an insubstantial fate.
I can think of it now in the context 
    of this human frame,
hands to write it, lips to speak it
    as transcendental prophecy.
Not only the dead but the living
can pass to this realm beyond matter.
All who have lived or ever will are there already
but only one in a thousand suspects it.

Why, then, do I crave for touching,
for arm-enfolding tenderness on winter nights?
Why do I ache for the line of a slender neck,
a moist surrender, the firmness of flesh,
the drumbeat sonnet of another’s heart
loud in my ears, the harmony
of pacing my breath to another’s breath,
falling limbs entwined into a trusting sleep, 
or waking first and thanking the gods
for this wall of life between me and uncertainty?

I do not know, except that love
is the fluid of the Muses,
the enhancer of meaning, chariot of purpose,
that one plus one is not two
    but infinity,

that entropy, this modern malaise
    of the wasting leaf
is the false side of the coin of nature —
base metal welded to hidden gold.

3

Listen! October is coming!

It will not be like any other October.
You will be torn from your ease and comfort
by the one who loves you. You will follow
a strange wind northward, not as surrender
to an autumn urge, but as a warrior
for Spring. Glaciers will shudder back
at the green fringe of your beard. Your smile
will make strangers trust you, ask to know
what manner of tree sends youthful emigrants —
even the dry-leaf exiles will stir at your arrival.

You shall not pass the winter in random flight,
    nor cling to the steeples and chimney-tops.

Not for you the graveyard and its lying testaments,
not for you the vicarious touching of lovers and losers —

All shall know you and say of you:
Here is the one who loves and risks all.
You shall not heed the devious sea
and the night-call of Neptune’s ravenous hosts.
The owl, the raven, the whippoorwill,
    the squirrel, the cat, the sparrow
shall teach you the ways of their defiance of season,
their hidden thrust for continuance.

Boisterous, active, strident as a new tree
    you shall take root again,
defying the shadow master of winter,
    the devil of frost,
refusing to yield one leaf to the ache-long nights.

And you rejoice in your numbered mortality,
in love, at risk of happiness for a single embrace,
at risk of loss and denial, too —
but knowing it and caring not.

A love, an eye, a heart, a hand,
a witness to ever advancing hope,
one to the power of infinity —
one plus a fraction, approaching,
but never reaching, duality.

4

Which shall it be? This orient autumn
or this renascent spring? This painless slide
into the lush oblivion of ash, or wing beat
in Daedalus flight to a promised star?

I only know that October is coming.
It will not be like any other October.

 — September 1985, Providence, RI

Green Things Are Melancholy (Anniversarius 12)

Some say these winter hills are sad.
I think not so. 

              Gray bark and snow
are just the world in homespun clad,

plain and simple, honest and bare
to branch and root,
                  dry underfoot —
these are the ones who do not dare

rebellion or unruly flight.
The withered sleep,
                  the dream they keep,
to them is wisdom’s light.

Green is the melancholy hue:
seedling and twig,
                blossom and sprig,
rioting upward, askew,

climbing aslant in May’s folly
following one
             devious sun—
how can this be melancholy?

Just ride the suicidal breeze:
seed-spewing trees,
                 lecherous bees,
the wingèd birds’ hypocrisies —

These are false harbingers of joy.
What use are they?
                Their vernal play
is but a manic’s  fevered ploy.

Wait till the frost arrives — what then?
The birds fly south.
                  The wizened mouth
of fruit and flower saddens men

With bitter kisses youth should scorn —
the chill and numb
                  chrysanthemum
as blanched and dry as ravaged corn —

The maples shorn have been undone —
the barren vine
              a twisted line
of snake embracing skeleton —

The lily stalks are cripple canes.
The pale worm flees
                   the apple trees.
A gray mist fills the lanes.

Green is the hue
          betraying you
for a handful of earth
         or a moment of dew!

 — December 17, 1978, New York; revised 1981, 1993, rewritten in 1995.

A rare example of a Rutherford poem that rhymes.

Dead Leaves the Emblems Truest (Anniversarius 11)

 

Autumn
         love the Autumn
would fill the earth with perpetual
Autumn;
         if I were rich enough
I’d follow Autumn everywhere,
paint my home in Shelley’s orange
    and brown and hectic red;
rub tincture of turning leaves
onto my own limbs to motley
    my skin into a panoply
    of hues; buy potted trees
and fill my darkened rooms with them,
inject them full of October
until I lay ankle deep in fallings
of pages more wrinkled and withered
and crisped and sere than poor Poe’s

Spring
    I salute only as birth-of-death
Summer    its ripening
Autumn    the fruit
Winter       the ice-toothed bacchanal
    of rampant death

Dead leaves the emblems truest of what we are:
cut to a rasping skeleton by time,
best in our wormwood age,
most useful to our kind
when closest to verge of nothingness.

How wise you are, detached
    at last from your origins,
borne by a wind that will not betray you,
confident, sun-singed, beyond all pain,
surging toward heaven without an enemy
    to hold you back, assured of what
is written in your own veined hand —
that you are a particle of glory returning to god.

To god? What folly! like old men whose legs
cannot support them you tumble down in heaps.
You burn in hecatombs, boots crush you to dust;
you are composted until the merest speck of you
is salt for the cannibal taproots of Spring.

Magnificent folly! For what is there at the end
of a billion misled heartbeats but this putting on
of shrouds? Should we not deck ourselves as well
as the oak tree, as maples jubilant,
or triumph-touched in willow’s gold?

I think I shall be Autumn’s minister.
Instead of those hearts torn out for the Aztec god,
I offer up a basket of leaves; instead of blood
upon the butcher block of Abraham I slay
a wreath of myrtle and laurel boughs;
upon the thirsty cross I nail a scarecrow Christ,
a wicker man with leaf-catch crown of thorns —

It was the cross itself that died for us
    the man a nobody
         a tree-killing carpenter

And folly still!
    The lightning limns the bare branch elm
 The hollow trunk howls thunder of its own
         to oust the thunder of god

The slaked storm passes, the fire-striped
         masts of the earth-ship stand.
Ear to the tree trunk, I hear the echo
         of the storm, the last tree-
         spoken words:

   I bring you glad tidings —
                     There is no god.

There is no god, and when trees speak
the storm falls back in silence, shamed
    and reprobate.
There is no god, and when trees speak
    you kill them for the truth
    you cannot bear.

 — June 14, 1981, Madison Square Park, New York City, rev. 2011.

The Grim Reaper (Anniversarius 10)

Autumn, and none too soon for me.
Bitter blasts unshingle the trees
and scatter the birds — the diminution
to bone branch by gale’s tooth.

Ave! I welcome you, Red Harvester
of yet another year! I kindle fire
and hold my midnight watch atop a hill.

Ave! for everything awaits you:
the arbor picked clean of fruit,
the willows decked in banners of gold,
the windfall of currency
   from the abundant oaks.

Ave! Great Reaper who takes a year of everything.
Great Reaper who grinds the present to dust,
Great Reaper the only god (the others no more
than barricades you sweep aside, leaf dunes)

I see you. Your eyes play through me as easily
as sight itself moves through these barren trees.
You have no face. Two flames from out
your hooded darkness acknowledge me.
The scythe on which the world-end hone
but lately sang is in your hand.

My time is not yet come, thrice hailèd one.
I too must reap. I too must count the census
of lost leaves. My song must satisfy
before your hand can take the sheaf.
This space, this interstice between
the solstices is safe. My time
is not yet come.

 — December 17, 1978, New York; revised 1981