The Problem With Utopias

by Brett Rutherford

It was all fine and good
in the land of milk and honey.
Everyone had the same religion
and worshiped the same elder god,
shaggy and jealous as he was,
short-tempered with plague and flood,
until the young men, tempted, strayed,
into the arms of “strange women.”

Each time a holy man or woman
led hundreds away
to some hidden valley,
life was perfect, as though
all minds were of common accord,
until the children born there
had quite enough of Paradise,
craving flesh-pots and pyramids.
Utopia is not genetic; in fact,
each generation must make its own.

The worker’s paradise
looked fine on paper, way back
in the soot-chimney gloom of ‘48.
No matter that half the population
would have to be murdered at last
to give the other half a dull life

of gray and anonymous equality.

Galt’s Gulch and lumberjack liberty
appealed to many, ego-proud.
It made us feel good to be worthy,
and smart, and fully in tune
with the provisos of absolute logic.
Like Christ who pushed off
the ledge of Heaven,
all of Satan’s bad angels,
Ayn Rand
would hurl the beggars and moochers
into the nullity they so well deserved.
It wasn’t really a philosophy,
and sure as hell it knew no history,
but it was a solipsist Utopia smug
on top of a coming dystopia.

The worst Utopia of all
is the pig-selfish Heaven
the TV evangelists shovel out
as dullard’s dollars flow in
to support their personal fortunes
and offshore bank accounts.

This Heaven is a pig-sty of desire
amid perpetual harp-playing
and off-key singing, a sky
where squalling babies and lost pets
forever seek their former owners,
smug Paradise of only the saved
with choice seats
to look down into Hell.

Meanwhile, the real world
is a Utopia of Things
whose makers rule
like Byzantine Emperors.

Hail to the Six Treasures:
guns and drugs, cars and girls,
tobacco-death, sports mania.
No Utopia without pizza!
No Heaven without women
waiting to be grabbed!
No Paradise without guns,
and something quivering
to be stalked and shot.
Heaven is a big cigar,
hog-mouth open for the next slice
with lots of pepperoni,
and all of them, all men of course,
are all the spitting image
of Tom Brady.

At least the animals are not
the least bit interested
in making a Utopia.
They live in the present,
and that is all there is.

The Orphaned Vase

by Brett Rutherford

Two decades or more I have studied it:
that double-dragon-handled vase
from my New York hauntings.
Bought from a Chinese store
about to shut down forever,
its unsold vases stacked,
dust-covered orphans
that had never found a home.

Today I regard it with new eyes
and undertake to learn its origins,
and what the wriggling floral shapes
and tangled leaves can tell me.

Amid the leaves are Treasures:
a thick square book in a silken cord,
a checker board awaiting two players,
two rice-paper scrolls tied up
blank for calligraphy to come,
and two rhinoceros horns
predicting happiness
for the vase’s owner.

It was intended, no doubt,
to be a young scholar’s first vase,
its carmine glaze the blush
of a young man’s ardor,
its unknown, ardent flowers
all petals open to the sun.

It is all good omens, but no one came
to the old shop on Mott Street
to carry it off; no scholar sipped
his oolong tea and wrote poems
in the cheer of its good karma.

Close scrutiny reveals
some hint of the reasons why:
one of the dragon handles
is missing the monster’s snout.
Some accident — a fall, a ricochet
of a bandit’s bullet, broke off
this beast’s ability
to snort a blowtorch back
at a would-be attacker.

One also sees
the whole vase is a-tilt.
It leans some five degrees
off vertical, so doomed to sit
like someone whose leg
is shorter than the other,
a tipsy vase just ready
to take a tumble.

It is a century old, I guess.
It is lonely for its maker,
for the fine-haired brush
that painted it, for the wheel
on which it was cast lopsided.

It comes from a kiln
that exists no more. One day,
a Japanese bomber took sight
at the Wude Sheng factory
and all was blown
to smithereens.

Thou, sad vase,
thou, snoutless dragon,
thou, limping, tilted vessel,
orphan of war and history.

A Millennium of Printing

 by Brett Rutherford

Those of us old enough to have touched and used metal type have a sense of the astonishing printing progress made in the last half-century. The all-digital generations following us will have grown up with digital cameras, desktop publishing, and instant Internet access to vast libraries of “virtual” books. To them, the history of printing will be quaint and charming. Its only inheritance may be the traditional esthetics that distinguish fine design and printing from semi-literate junk. People will know that printing looked better in the “good old days,” but they won’t know why.

            Our printing descendants, if they visit a museum displaying printing presses and typesetting machinery, might marvel at how printers, at the turn of the 20^th century, still rubbed greasy ink on raised metal type and pressed it against paper, much as Johannes Gutenberg had done in the 1450s.

            The chronology of printing is fascinating, with its long letterpress “stone age,” followed by a burst of 19^th Century inventions such as the rotary press, the Linotype machine, the halftone screen, and photoengraving. The triumph of offset lithography after World War II, however, started a revolution in invention that is now reaching its apogee — with innovations coming so fast that the industry can barely keep up with them.

            The printing industry, even as late as the 1970s, would still have been recognizable to a printer of 100 years earlier. The industry we are becoming in the post-2000 world, though, will be one the old-fashioned printer could not even imagine. We are already at the point where we can get a book or magazine to a printing press without consuming any materials such as film, chemicals, proofs, or plates. In less than two decades, the book or magazine itself will become a  “virtual” product, with readers printing out text passages or color images only if they want to keep or share them. Coffee table art books will transfer images to virtual paintings on our walls. Virtual magazines will have moving, talking advertisements, and celebrity interviews that can be heard as well as read. Libraries will be accessible 24 hours a day, with on-line reading/printing of public domain texts. 

            We really can’t even imagine where it will all lead, but all these things are steps along the way to the inventor’s ideal: imaging machinery that has no moving parts, never wears out, and uses no “consumables” other than energy.

 

How We Got Here

            Gutenberg, Senefelder, Mergenthaler and other inventors who moved us toward our all-digital age might be startled to see where the industry they steered has gone. Most of the inventors of the past sought a short-term goal, and envisioned the profits they would make because their machines could copy words and pictures faster, cheaper and better.

            We can look back on certain inventions and say, with some certainty, that they mattered a great deal in liberating printing from the days of scribes to the days of ink dots and pixels. Here are the creative landmarks that I believe have mattered most to the printing industry in the millennium now ended, a timeline of inventions and “firsts.”

            AD 800. Books are produced in quantity in Korea and Japan from hand-carved woodblocks.

            1041. Books are printed in China from movable ceramic clay type. Although books are printed and widely distributed by Imperial order, Europeans remain unaware of Chinese printing methods for almost half a millennium.

            1221. Books are printed in China from moveable type made from hand-carved wood blocks. As many as 30,000 separate Chinese characters were required!

            1453 to 1456. Gutenberg’s Bible. The first finished, complete European book proving that cast metal type could be used to produce a Bible comparable to the best work of scribes and illuminators. By the year 1500, there would be ten million printed books in Europe. By 1507, the Church began censoring some printed books, banning others. A few printers are ordered strangled or burned at the stake.

            1495. In Venice, Aldus Manutius is the first successful printer-publisher. He uses elegant, readable typefaces, woodcut illustrations, and smaller page sizes to produce affordable copies of Greek and Latin classics.

            1535. First printing press in the New World is set up in Mexico.

            1550. Wood engravings are the predominant method of producing illustrations, but intaglio engravings in copper gain appeal. The tradition of “multi-process” books, with text produced by one method and illustrations printed on separate sheets or signatures by another method, takes shape.

            1639. First printing in North America -- “The Freeman’s Oath” in Massachusetts.

            1725. The first stereotype plate is cast from a metal type form in Scotland. This is the first instance of a permanent “plate” apart from handset type. This meant that the original type could be redistributed and re-used. The method was not widely used, though, until much later in the 18^th century.

            1796. Alois Senefelder develops the art of stone lithography, printing from a flat, grained stone surface. This is the predecessor of offset lithography.

            1800. America’s first “coffee table” art book is published, a book of hand-colored engraved plates of “The City of Philadelphia.”

            1806. Machine-made paper becomes available for the first time, thanks to the invention of the Fourdrinier paper machine—the process still used today for papermaking. Before this time, all paper was hand-made.

            1814. The London Times uses steam power to print newspapers on a cylindrical press.

            1829. First typewriter is patented in Detroit, Michigan. Typewriters capable of working at the same speed as writing longhand would be not developed until the 1870s.

            1835 to 1841. W.H. Fox Talbot develops the techniques for making photographic negatives, and from them, any number of positive copies. Modern photography is born, with a profound impact on printing. The discovery that light-sensitive materials could capture and preserve toned images of real life was a bombshell. Until then, only a trained artist could represent reality, and only using hand tools and complicated techniques to represent tone and shadow.

            1840. First paper made from wood pulp instead of rag fibers. Bookworms started the march to extinction since they couldn’t eat paper made from wood pulp.

            1844. Richard Hoe’s first letterpress using an image carrier (stereotype) cylinder.

            1850. First stone lithographic press with automatic inking and impression cylinders. Lithographs rapidly became the principal means to produce posters and low-cost art reproductions.

            1860. First rotary gravure printing on paper in France. Gravure would one day become a printing giant, used for Sunday supplements, catalogs, and long-run magazines.

            1864. The halftone screen is invented. For the first time, a printing press could reproduce a photograph, simulating all its gradations of tone using dots of various sizes.

            1865. First web press built by William Bullock, with rotary letterpress image carrier and impression cylinders. Web printing is off and running.

            1868. First rotary litho press using zinc plates.

            1870. In-line folding machines fold sheets into signatures as they come off press. Laid-off New York City bindery girls, in desperation, become dance hall performers.

            1872. Photoengraving of letterpress plates is introduced. Engravings of halftones or line drawings can now be printed on the same form with metal type.

            1875. Carl Klitsch develops photochemical engraving for gravure printing.

            1879. Thomas Edison invents the electric lamp, with a profound impact on American culture and industry. The electrification of cities and factories means the end of reliance on steam and human power for printing machinery.

            1886. Ottmar Mergenthaler unveils the Linotype machine, the first successful device to automate typesetting. The Linotype, one of the greatest inventions of all time, cast individual, justified lines of metal type, using matrices that dropped from an overhead compartment. After being used to cast the type in molten lead, the matrices were automatically redistributed. Productivity was 500% greater than setting type by hand. His invention would sweep the world and would be the dominant method of typesetting for more than 60 years.

            1891. Tolbert Lanston introduces the Monotype typesetter.

            1892. First color printing using three-color halftone screens.

            1904. Offset lithography is invented. The act of printing “second hand” from a cylindrical rubber blanket instead of by direct contact with the image carrier had profound implications – so profound that offset, in less than half a century, would become the dominant printing process.

            1930. First four-color offset press is installed. American “photolithographers” would spend decades perfecting the four-color printing process.

            1942. Magnetic tape introduced. Although it took decades for cheap, recordable/ erasable magnetic media to impact the graphic arts, today we rely on it to store all our jobs.

            1951. First color television. A technology that would lead to color computer monitors and the whole world of color perceived as RGB.

            1954. Phototypesetting begins with the introduction of the Harris Fotosetter. During the next 20 years, phototypesetting became faster and cheaper, and the typesetting industry came into its glory days as entrepreneurs bought the new technology. Metal typesetting was all but obsolete by 1970.

            1957. Helvetica typeface introduced. A dark day for printing.

            1960. Invention of the laser. No single invention since the Linotype has had more impact on the graphic arts industry. The laser’s ability to focus a microscopic dot at high energy levels has brought it into use in all kinds of imaging devices – and the end is not in sight.

            1962. First Xerox copier. The copier would come to dominate the black and white printing market within two decades.

            1964. Introduction of word processing systems. The existence of text in stored media instantly presented both challenge and opportunity to typesetters and printers. By 1975, word processors became affordable standalone units with disk storage. The first inklings here of putting the prepress into the hands of the customer – another trend that isn’t over yet.

            1968. First all-digital typesetter. No more film fonts, since fonts are now “software.”

            1972. First color copiers. A harbinger that “color on demand” would one day be the customer’s credo.

            1980. The desktop laser printer. Within 20 years, there would be a desktop printer accessible to almost anyone with a computer.

            1981. Introduction of PostScript by Adobe, Inc. , the first device-independent file format for text and graphics. Today’s wildly popular PDF format is an offshoot of PostScript.

            1984. Apple Computers introduces the Macintosh, the first computer whose operating system included on-screen type and graphics.

            1985. Desktop publishing is introduced to Mac users in Aldus Pagemaker, and to PC users with Xerox Ventura Publisher. For the first time, ordinary computer users are able to lay out complete publications and see them represented on screen exactly as they will print.

            The 1990s. Well, you’ve lived through them. An explosion of new technology, at plummeting prices. Cheap color printers, cheap scanners, 50-cent type fonts, huge PC disk drives, the Internet, digital presses, wide format printing – yegods, where will it all lead us?

The Admonition

 by Brett Rutherford

Two chock-a-block gingerbread Victorians
stand jowl-to-jowl, identical, one brown,
one red with paint a-peeling, otherwise
who could distinguish one from another?
So, the same architect built two of them
on plots too small: one narrow passageway,
set in perpetual shadow between.
I enter the cool shadow to confirm
the same bay windows jutting hopefully
where never a glimmer of light came in.
The crusty pavement underfoot, the coo
of pigeons give this a cave-like aura.

The realtor ushers me to the porch,
a deep-shaded, one where once, on gliders,
they sat of an evening with lemonade
and talked the news of an innocent age.
Inside, it is rather a shambles.
Wood-paneled parlor, fireplace, French doors
to a large dining-room, all very nice
but the antique wallpaper is undone
and the mummy-powder of plaster dust
and the hairy fringe of rampant mildew.

Upstairs is a warren of bedrooms. “Sons,
five of them, were all raised here,” I am told.
“So everything is all the worse for wear.
After the boys were grown and gone, it was
college boys rooming here, year after year.”
“I need a little time alone,” I tell
my guide, “to get the house’s true atmosphere.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” the realtor says.
“It’s quiet, if that’s what you want to have.
Next door it’s just a husband and wife, and
but for Sunday no one ever sees them.”
“Church people?” I ask. She nods. “Old-fashioned
folks who mind their own business, I’m sure.
Well now, just take your time. I’ll wait out there.”

Up I went to third floor: more rooms, with slant
of ceiling but plenty of good windows.
The window just across reveals nothing
of the furnishings of the quiet neighbors.
Ah, but there is a paper sign, taped up
and in neat lettering admonishing
some former student tenant: DO NOT SLEEP …
I cannot make out the rest, the letters
bled with rain leaking into the cracked pane.

From the adjacent room, I spy another
warning sign: Bitte schlafen Sie nicht mit …
the bottom torn. The last room facing in
toward the stern neighbors is painted black.
I imagine the neighbors up at night,
their Bibles always open to Leviticus,
worse yet, to Numbers and Deuteronomy,
hand-lettering their little sermonettes
to the blaspheming and drunk college boys.

I go to the bathroom’s smaller window
and see across to their well-lit chamber:
a claw-foot bathtub, a shiny white sink.
Between the tub and the window, I see
a palisade of two-by-fours, as though
they had started to build a new drywall,
but later abandoned the idea.
Taped to it and facing my view, a sign
of more recent vintage cautions me:
PLEASE DO NOT SLEEP WITH MRS. KELLY.

I clamber up to the attic to see
if the widow’s watch is accessible.
It is! Up into it I climb. I dream
of sitting up here with notebook in hand,
surveying full half of the seacoast town
and even out into the great harbor.

You can imagine my astonishment
to see, within the matching widow’s watch
a figure regarding me eye to eye,
a beckoning fair one whose handkerchief
waves me a friendly greeting. Below her,
the thing to which she points her lily hand
languidly, is a ladder some roofer
abandoned there conveniently. With ease
it could connect one house to the other.
Her dark eyes summon me. Oh, Mrs. Kelly!

Cometary Love

by Brett Rutherford

My solitude is astronomical.
One time I loved, I loved a comet-star:
once seen, once held, once even bonded to,
he flew away to some outer orbit.
Long is the wait until he comes again;
chances are good that I’ll be dead before
earthward swings his next perihelion.

But now that Hubble’s eye has caught me up,
I learn that things are more dire than I thought:
I am a comet, too, not rooted to earth,
not anywhere near the warm small orbits
of the inhabited worlds. My folly
was to lock my ice-shagged eyes on someone
just as cold, remote and inarticulate.
We each mistook the sun’s fire as our own
as we grazed by one another, flirting
with borrowed heat and false radiation.

On earth, a double comet was double-doom
to tyrants and to religious zealots;
to us it was a candle-lit romance.
I thought you fled from me; you thought I fled.
Each in our own ellipse we sped away.
Now I am told just what the odds might be
that we might ever come so close again,
or even — just imagine that — collide.

Not for an eternity of orbits
will such a thing occur. In fact, the sun
is on its own death-calendar. In flame
and supernova flash all will be burnt.

Whatever made me think I was a man,
and that I, a poet, a flaming star
could woo and win with words and rapt glances?
Who could, with sonnets, defeat gravity?

Rostropovich in London, 1968

 

by Brett Rutherford

Never on such a night did a London audience sit
raptured yet each at the edge of their seat, as Slava played

the yearning and passionate solos, ensembles and rests
of the Dvorak Cello Concerto. They saw that he wept
as he played, sobbing at times; they saw how his face was flushed

and red, as though he had been called to bar, a criminal.
All underscored the urgent throb of vibrato, the long,
long arc of his bowing, the endless homesickness and love
of a Czech composer an ocean away from homeland.

All this while the Soviet tanks rolled across the Moldau
and Eastern Bloc forces occupied the streets of Prague.

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