The Empty Tureen

 

by Brett Rutherford

     In memory of François Vatel (1631 – 24 April 1671)

 To die for the gods,
for one's planet,
for a nation, even,
is honorable

 and we invent Valhallas
where the worthy great
feast endlessly with
poets and composers
all around them.

 To will one’s own death
over dishonor
seems quaint,
and even ridiculous
when psychopaths
caught, just whirl and turn,
accusing their accusers.

 Vatel, the great chef
of the great Condé,
a better man
than his better,
fled the banquet,
hid in his room,
fell on his sword
over a spoiled dinner.

 No one had come by horse,
galloping to Chantilly
as ordered, no one came
with the one ingredient
intended to delight
Louis Quatorze —

 the moment had come
and gone, when one tureen
could be tipped, one course
converted from bland
to sublime. It tipped;
the waiter’s face turned white
when nothing came;

the tureen was empty,
as all down the line
of two thousand dukes,
barons, widows and mistresses,
each silver vessel
was tipped
and came up likewise
void as a cenotaph —

 and so, in the apartment
above, the great chef
impaled himself and died
for want of lobster sauce.

 

 

Partridge Season

by Brett Rutherford

At August’s end
the partridge weeps.
The hunters come
with their slobby dogs
on the morrow.

The hen who laid the egg
that hatched you,
has been taken alive.
The sire who flew
and taught you cloud-lore
and hawk-watch
hides on the branch
of a pear tree.

You watch from where
the hedge-row nest
gave shelter. Fledgling
just shorn of baby feathers,
you tremble and wait.

Giants tread back and forth
in boots that smash
all the good things beneath;
the dire hounds clench
and unclench their jaws
in practice, tails wild
with expectation.

The captive hen
is placed in a cage,
atop a tree-stump,
away from hedge-rows.

The men hide
in a thing made out
to resemble
a boxwood shrubbery,
a little green castle
brimming with
shotgun barrels.

They know the hen
will call out plaintively.
They know another male
partridge will come
a-calling, and another,
and maybe another.

They will circle the hen-cage,
they will pick at wire
and wicker, calling back
at her song of distress.

The hunters’ blind
trembles. Not yet! Not yet!
Another male arrives.
A shot! Wings fly!
More shots! The dogs
run after in howl and fury.

One hound comes back
with your uncle in his mouth,
another, your brother.

Into a sack they go.
This, they call sport.

The Only White Boy

 by Brett Rutherford

Newark, New Jersey in 1969.
I lived there, in student rooms
not far from where
the burned houses still smoked.

One Saturday I stood
outside a downtown theater,
scrawny white poet amid
bereted and tree-tall giants,
black men brimming
with gasoline anger.
Arms that had hurled
molotovs, bodies
that had taken a beating
and kept on coming,
pressed in the line
behind me.

I mind-read dark thoughts
directed at me, at what
might happen
if they saw me after,
but we were here
for one common purpose.

The marquee decreed it:
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.
This was not to be missed.
I would sit with anyone,
anywhere, to see this.
It was that important.

I sat in my seat of seats,
fourth row, center.
All those I feared
were far behind me.
Not half an hour in,
the men began screaming.
With cries of "Oh my god!"
and "No, no, no!"
I heard them rush
to the exits.

When zombies ate innards,
I heard the sound behind
of muffled vomiting;
more footsteps retreated.

By film's end
I was the only one left.
I strode through the lobby
smiling.

 

Quart d'Heure

 by Brett Rutherford

Well, that was a “carder,”
the Englishman said,
after his rude encounter
with a pack of dogs.

How quaint to call trauma
un mauvais quart d'heure,
a bad quarter-hour,

quart d’heure
just long enough
for the bullies to pull
your books, your coat,
backpack, umbrella,
and send them flying
over a high fence

quart d’heure
just time enough
for a rapist to do
what he wants to you,
zip up, and flee
the scene

quart d’heure
ill quadrant
of the clock of doom,
the time it takes
to bleed out,
pass out, expire

quart d’heure,
nine hundred
and thirty seconds,
to be precise,
the stone-cold interval
of falling out of love.

 

Alien and Invasive

 by Brett Rutherford

In the language of exclusion,

queer means

not harmlessly eccentric

but dangerously odd,

not just outcast, outside,

unwelcome by nature,

but eager to convert,

recruit, corrupt, seduce.

How would it feel

to be called a weed,

a more sinister slang

for "garden escapee," —

How stung would you be

to have beside your name

as asterisk, footnoted

"alien and invasive species." —

How being on lists

to be anathematized,

lobotomized and

sterilized, must feel —

How walking fast

on certain blocks

in front of taverns,

playgrounds, you hope

just not to be noticed —

How being told

by the holy fathers

you are condemned to Hell,

and lawyers who fight

for civil rights, avert

their eyes when yours

are being taken —

The weed, the wolf,

the furtive coyote,

the creeping vine

with trumpet flowers

in rainbow hue --

we are just one

of every ten of you.

Backwards

 by Brett Rutherford

Is where we wake
from where we sleep
the same, or other?

What if the morning clock
ran counter-clock
and the numbers read
12-11-10 instead
of 12 - 1 - 2 - 3; 

what if I see
the letters run backward
on my computer screen,
not mirror, but everything
turned wrong-way round?

Hot and cold faucets
now cold and hot; a jar
I try to open unlids
by turning right, not left.

The books are now shelved
from Z to A, each title indexed
in reverse order. I seem
to remember tomorrow
and I have no idea
what will happen yesterday.

 It could be worse,
forward, backward,
right, left, time past
and time to come
I can learn to deal with.

 I could be upside down,
you see, my bed up there
on the ceiling, my tea
refusing its cup and flowing
up and out the window.

 I could, on hands and knees,
crawl up the street, or stand
and hurl myself from pole
to parking meter, each step
at peril of sending me skyward.

 Better it is to stay
asleep, and spin the odds
of waking up where left
is left and right, right,
my bed awhirl
among a maelstrom
of gravity's variants.

 (Illustration for Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" by Harry Clarke.)

Bag of Bones

by Brett Rutherford

When they arrested him
in his Brighton Beach hovel,
amid the dust and termites,
the untold generations
of roach egg-cases
and rodent droppings,

when they surveyed,
for evidence his vast,
uncatalogued library —
mostly Judaica and thus
unreadable to detectives

they knew they were beyond
their depth, despite all
the hidden cameras
that more than proved
he frequented the morgue,

and entering with a stolen key,
had had his way, some way,
with lady's corpses, but left
no sign except those deft
incisions in their backs,
cracked spines
the only sign
of his intrusion.

And more confounding
yet, were the tracks
he left, matched to
his shoes, into and out
of Mt. Sinai Cemetery,
the freshly-dug graves
disturbed, coffins
most assuredly opened,
the female occupants
disrobed and turned
face down -- again,
spines cut and cracked
like walnuts.

And what they found
was this bag of bones,
like knuckles or parts
of vertebrae. The DNA
from in the marrow said
"Human," but no one knew
just how these malformed
pieces had ever been
inside a human form.

Only a week in jail
and the threat
of what befell
such a frail young man
when the lights went out --
ah, he confessed.

He was the last
in a long line of thieves,
his uncle the last one
to pass the secret
of how to steal the "luz,"

the bone unknown
to anatomists because
it was invisible in place,
the indestructible bone
at the heart
of resurrection.
No luz, no afterlife.

How could this ghoul
have hoped to profit
from the kernels of souls?
Did he make soup from them
in hope of longevity?

At last he confessed it all:
that he was known
to a circle of unhappy men
who were schooled in Kabala,
how they paid him well ...

"For the bones?" the detectives asked.
"Did they seek to make magic
with these impossible bones?"

"Not so," the luz-ghoul answered.
"They gave me the key to the morgue,
the names and dates, the map
to the gravesites I was to visit."

"To what end?" the detective demanded.

"So when they rise," the thief smiled.
"Their dead first wives will not
be there awaiting them."

My First Jewish Boyfriend

 by Brett Rutherford

New to the City, I am struck

by the beauty of young Jewish men.

Red-haired Princes of the City

they seem to me.

They know everything about everything.

The one I am most enamored of

I see at the opera in standing room,

at the cheap seats in Carnegie Hall,

in the library at Lincoln Center.

He notices I notice him. We talk.

His Ashkenazi genius is assured.

He knows the words to the operas,

as do I. He knows the difference

between one conductor’s Beethoven

and another’s. He shows me

the right restaurants, and where to shop

amid the delis and stores

of the Lower East Side.

After two dates, I am taken home

to meet Mother. Top of a high-rise

not far from Grand Army Plaza,

windows with a view to die for.

Mother regards my clothes with pity,

sparks up as we talk about poets

and Russian music. “Oh, well,”

she sighs, “I see why my son likes you.”

As she prepares dinner, he confides,

“Mother so disapproves of me.

We had painters in last month

and she warned them, said right

in front of me, ‘Pay him no mind.

You are not to speak to my son.

He is a homosexual and is not well.’ "

Then, whispered, “Of course I had sex

with all of them before a week had passed.”

I am introduced to matzos

and a chicken broth that was not

to be forgotten. The dinner was peppered

with questions about my family.

Each answer I gave was worse

than its predecessor, until I felt

I was the merest mongrel. I doubted

that dessert would come at all

as my family tree was no more than a shrub.

What business had such a prince

with a poet whose glasses

were taped together, whose clothes

were more clown than scholar?

He vanished after that. I called,

but he evaded me. Finally,

outside the opera, he said,

“Look, there’s something

I need to tell you. I’m not

any good as a friend to anyone.

You don’t want to know me.

I was sent away to an asylum.

My mother had me committed.

It was all I could do

to talk my way out of that place.”

I assured him I did not care.

There was nothing wrong with him,

and a great deal wrong with his mother.

“I can’t see anyone,” he answered,

head drooped as he walked away.

“No one should want to know me.”

Months later, a man comes up to me

as I lean on the rail in standing room.

“I know you liked Michael,” he begins.

My head turns enough to see

this is no one I know. “I saw you

together, and more than once.

You’ll want to know he killed himself

about three weeks ago.”

Pity the Dragon

 

by Brett Rutherford

PITY THE DRAGON

Surveying my vases,
teapots and paintings,
I count no less
than thirty dragons
leaping from peak
into a sea of clouds,
ever in chase
of that flaming pearl
it is never allowed
to swallow, apart
from its kind around
the curve of vase,

contending with phoenixes,
cloud clots, and even
perversely huge flowers,
it is never permitted
to meet one of its kind,
to caress, converse,
make love. One wonders

if new dragons are ever made
at all. Seldom entirely
free, one claw behind
a tuft of smoke, the edge
of a clifftop, the line
of a rooftop — even
the artist constrains it
with such device
in fear of its free flight,
its all-consuming
flame. How free
is free if one is ever
alone and above
the loved world?

 

Some Epigrams and Short Poems

by Brett Rutherford


WHAT’S THE USE?

I am the burr
on the foot of God,
the thorn
on his son's temple,
the thirteenth guest
who was turned away
at the Lord's supper.

I warn of Satan,
Caesar, Judas.
No one ever listens.


THE HUNGER

Life is one thing
that eats another
and continues on.
Every tree wants
to devour the sun;
each blade of grass
wishes to be a razor
deterring all tread;

the appetite of shark,
the vampire lust
of the crouching spider,
the tongue-lick
of advancing mold,

your gourmet dinner —
what life is, is what it wills.




DO NOT EXPLAIN

Defend an epigram? Explain it?
I would as soon expound
a sunrise, or good sex.

The epigram, at least,
outlives the other two,
and clings with hooks
to its intended target.




AT THE SPECKLED EGG

Where two had breakfasted
in splendor, one returns.
"Only one," the host sighs,
as he leads you there,
to that special table, front
facing a blank column,
back to the in-out door
of the restrooms. You know
the rest. A sleepy waiter
looks down on you
as though you had six legs
and intended to infest.

Your order comes last,
as tables for four and six
order and finish in time
for their appointed dayjobs.

The pancakes are cold.
The bacon you ordered
and had the waiter repeat
"Bacon?" "Yes, bacon please,"
is nowhere to be seen.
The iced tea was made
some days ago, and when
you send it back, no offer
of other beverage comes.

You pay, and shuffle off
like the insect you are,
the solitary diner
they hid between
a column and a flushing
toilet. Take care
when you wait on a poet!


KNOWING

Knowledge is always
"knowledge of."

Religion,
concerned with things
that are not
and never were,
is not knowledge.


OUTSIDE IN

We have lived to see
the outer planets,
rings, moons, seas and all;
craters in rich detail, poles
North and South, cracks
into hidden water seas,
bust-outs of frozen gas
into their sparse and fatal
atmospheres.

Oh, but with all those comets
ellipsing in and brushing by,
what if there are eyes
and cameras, convex
antennas and radios
reporting back everything
as they graze near
the warm blue world
with its white blanket
of ominous storm-clouds?

What if the outer planets
look back
and are much displeased?


AMERICAN EDUCATION

Out on the playground
it's cowboys and Indians,
Yanks and Confederates,
soldiers and Viet Cong.
A stick suffices.
"Bang! You're dead!"
is all it takes
to score a point,

the victim obliged
to stage a death,
hand to heart
or belly,
death cry of Aaargh!
or No!
limbs shaking, and then
the stone of rigor mortis.

Back in the classroom,
James raises the stick
and tells the teacher,
"Bang! You're dead!"

No problem. This is
the moment of moments
that Mr. Morrison
has been waiting for.
All in a day's work.

Taking his AR-15
from under the desk,
unlocked and loaded
for just such a threat,
he aims and fires.

One to the head.
Two to the heart —
that's just in case,
you know. James falls.
No Aaargh! or gasp
since the boy's head is gone.
Arms and legs twitch
for lack of instruction.

"Gotcha!" says Mr. Morrison.
"Damn! I love
being a teacher."

EASY WAY OUT

Those who turn to religion
for answers

do not even know
the actual questions.



LATE JULY

It is that time
of year again.
Answer no doorbell.
Turn out your lights
of an early evening.
Park the car elsewhere.

As sure as the bite
of mosquito and gnat,
or the wave
of unwelcome spiders,

a multitude is coming,
car after car, tread
upon tread on the sidewalk;
two buses, even
some will take to reach you.

The menace is green
as seen through peep-hole
or the security cam
and it just keeps on coming
until the first frost
has done its business.

Ring! Ring!
     Do not answer it!
If you forget
and swing the door open,
their anthem rings out,
“Hi there!” and “Gifts we bear!”
“Zucchini from our garden!”



WHAT'S LEFT

Just one dead leaf
from an autumn past,

a single lost arrow
from whom
to who knows where,

a solitary quill
some long-dead porcupine
stuck into a would-be
predator,

an epigram in Greek,
returning an insult
or starting a war,

small things adrift
in the dust of planets.



UNDIAGNOSED

According to the then-prevalent
theories of psychiatry/psychology,
I would have been sent away,

and probably lobotomized
for the protection of society,
before I turned sixteen.

I fooled them
by reading their books first.
Chameleon am I,
master of ink blot
and personality test.

They will never get me,
not like the auntie
who drooled and died
in the state asylum,
or the other, a suicide.

I dwell in my madness,
and not alone --

oh, there are others, others!

WHAT NOT TO SAY

I think I have been
in this bedroom before,

and your cat
knows me.

Politics As Usual

by Brett Rutherford

The antelope runs.
The lion is on the chase.
The jackal is as smug
as a country club Republican.
He looks at his watch
and sips another martini.
Just a little while longer
while fur and flesh
are torn asunder.
The jackal rides out
with cart and caddy
to find the spot
where the steaming carcass
awaits him. Dinner!

Super Flower Blood Moon

by Brett Rutherford

     May 15, 2022

A slow cloak covers
the Moon’s face,
red in shame.
Black Earth occludes
the light of sun.

For one dark hour
Luna shudders,
the perfect circle
of the Murder Planet
blotting all light,
the creeping advent
of the Conqueror Worm.

If there were gods
they might smite
those proud armies,
those squint-eyed
assassins. But no,

the Murder Planet rolls
on its course. Moon,
Sun and Earth
resume their roles
amnesiac:

the bright Sun disk,
the silver, shining Moon,
the Earth still blessed
with vast blue seas.

This was not news,
not like a Trump hand
groping a Kardashian —
barely a selfie photo-op —
an incident of no import
(who even looked up
on their way home from pizza?) —
a datum of almanac,
a planned distraction
of the eve of elections.

No, not an omen,
not even that.

Lady Cormora at the Tower of Gems

 by Brett Rutherford

A canto of my ongoing fairy-tale epic, "The Were-Raven," based on an ancient Danish ballad.
What has gone before: The Earl has been betwitched by a were-cormorant in human form, Lady Cormora, and her son, the dwarf Shagg, whom she passes off as her nephew. The Earl's daughter, Ermeline, has fled with the Were-Raven, rather than being forced to marry Shagg, whom Lady Cormora passes off as her nephew. Cormora, one of the last of the ancient Elds, appears to the Earl as a beautiful young woman: to everyone else she is a hideous crone. Cormora has turned to human form and wed the Earl because of her inordinate love of gems -- Ermeline's dowry is an enormous horde of gold and gems locked in a tower.

Of the Lady Cormora and the Tower of Gems


"The dowry is mine!” thus cried Cormora
as she rose at one dawn, at her table
scorning the dull amethysts and soft pearls
the Earl was wont to gift her, the least stones
in all the list of holy and magic
gems she craved to have around her. She rose,
and draping her black-feathered cloak around
her shriveled neck, her clawed and withered feet
crammed into velvet slippers, she walked
on rain-washed stepping-stones up to the base
of the well-guarded, high Tower of Gems.


Guards had a hundred times bowed down to her,
but would not let her pass. The barred-up door,
planks of broad oak studded with angry nails,
iron chains and adamantine locks no magic
could trick into falling away: these things,
and the Earl’s strong will in this one instance,
barred her from entering. Even the sight
of Lady Ermeline’s destined dowry — one glance! —
of the piled-high treasures wasting away
in total darkness, was denied to her. So it
ever was and is with a stepmother’s envy.


Oh! to bring light into the windowless tomb
where the many-faceted, rainbow-hued
gemstones languished! To bathe in them, their rays
a rainbow of light sparks renewing her;
to run her fingers along the facets, not touched
before except beneath the jeweler’s gaze;
to read, she could, the crystals’ calligraphy,
the angles that melded volcanic heat
into a cool geometry, the sun
itself captive as it mirrored itself
into an infinity of diamond rooms.

Last night, Cormora had implored the Earl,
“Now Ermeline has fled — I hear she sighs
in the arms of some unworthy lover;
and now that Shagg, my aggrieved young nephew,
as dear to both of us as an heir-son,
has been deprived of both bride and dowry.
Well might we open the Tower’s treasures
and add them to the general coffers.
Many defenses have languished undone,
and I conceive a hundred charities
that might endow our land with new-found fame.”

“It is yourself you think of,” the Earl charged,
his hair and beard a bramble of anger. —
“Dear husband, just as you say I am fair,
I would be counted fairer still, if but
a small portion of those gems adorned me.
The rest can find its way to greater good
through the hands of good and trusted stewards.

“Did many not come from some woman’s hand,
or some tiara’d head, some hoard that mother
held, to bless another’s generation?
Bereft as we might be, counting our days
sonless and daughterless, and without heirs,
doomed to our own gray mausoleums,
why should we not deck ourselves in splendor?”

The Earl mused long, for still the spell on him
made autumn crone into spring’s maidenhood,
not one hag begging for a shiny stone saw he,
but instead the blush of a new-found bride.
And though he knew he could not long refuse
her pleading, since in the bed’s canopy
she reigned with more force than an army,
still with his clenched jaw, and quivering,
he once again denied her wishes. “No,”
he uttered, “Cormora! The dowry stays.
The locks will yield to no one anyway.
Ermeline knows it not, but holds the key.”

Cormora raged. The Earl she left alone
in a half-bed to rue his stubbornness.

Now here she stood. The morning sun lit up
now every mortic’d stone, so tightly set
that not a toad could make an entrance there.
Around she walked, until she spied high up
one tiny niche — or hole — God! A window? —
just under the crenelated platform
that topped the ancient tower. A window!
So small it was, that even as cormorant
she could not pass in, or re-emerge therefrom.
(Though Eld she was, it was beyond her age
to be more than a crone or cormorant.)

And then, with mounting dread, she seemed to see
a tiny beak come out from the opening,
and then two minuscule wings — a sparrow.
“You drab brown flyer, what business yours
in the dark tomb of ownerless treasure?
Dare you to nest and soil my trove of gemstones
with twig and feather and broken eggshells?”

Off went the sparrow, and in its mouth
a rainbow gleam exploded. “A diamond!”
Cormora shrieked. “She has stolen a diamond!”
Soon came another sparrow in, then out
with ruby, red as pomegranate, held
and carried off. Cormora raged. One more
went darting in, and from some heap of gemstones
came out with one huge emerald embrooch’d
in gold. Comora shook her fists in rage,
raking her own dry face until it bled no less
a red than that of a fat carbuncle
another small bird dragged from out the hole
and lifted away in grasping talons.

Then came a topaz out like shining gold,
an azure-hinted sapphire, aquamarine,
a rare citrine with the blush of a peach,
again and again the diamonds hard as steel,
jasper and gold, agate and amethyst.
A hundred flew off with each her one stone;
a hundred more came down from flock on high
as sure as bees to their own hive and out
again with emerald and chalcedony,
sardonyx, cornelian, beryl, and chrysolite,
up to the hovering herd of sparrows
until the sky was rainbowed with color.
Pearls on a twine they carried off, armlets
and necklaces, ribbons of leaf of gold.

Cormora howled. She lay around and rolled
until the dust had covered her. The guards
did nothing — even he fiercest archer
could not have drawn one fleeting bird back down
from the wind-borne host. Some higher hawk hovered
above them, vast in wingspread, shepherding
the sparrow flock and urging them onward
in circled swoop and tilt of pinions, guide
and guardian against all other raptors.

The hundred small thieves became a thousand.
The sky grew dark with their beak and baggage,
and then in one great weave they were all gone.

Shagg came to comfort his groaning mother,
his broken mouth spat newly-minted Latin,
French proverbs, and bits of Cicero. Dust-mop
of flaxen hair, humped back and spindled legs
bent over her and told her, “All is not lost.
All bronze and brass, all gilded things, all swords
and knives, scepters and crowns are still inside.
Coins back to Rome and Egypt, Chaldean
idols all bloated with emeralds; so much
remains, and all of it our own. Weep not.”

But the madness of avarice consumed her.

“All those bright, shiny things — now all are gone,
taken by the most ignoble avians,
those pea-brain sparrows, mice of the heavens.
Ah! the bright, shiny things!” She would not rise,
and in her spite she willed herself to die.