The Birth of Zeus

 by Brett Rutherford

     From Callimachus Hymn 1, 1-16

If this is to be a hymn sung to Zeus,
then keep to the subject: the god himself,
the king eternal, mighty forever,
he in whose name we crushed the Pelagones,
who to the quarreling Olympians
stands as their judge and arbiters?

 But just which Zeus do we raise glasses to?
He of Mt. Dikte on the island of Crete?
Or he of our own loved Arcady
where sturdy Mt. Lycaeum claims his birth?
What am I to do (not libations two!)
since the one and only Zeus attends us?
My spirit is torn. Some hold for Ida,
others swear it must be Arcadia.

 Well, Cretans are always liars. If one
says “this,” he ever means “that.” Yes, a tomb
by those prevaricators was built up,
and offerings collected, you can be sure,
but what a cheat this is. Zeus did not die,
nor was he ever mortal, seeding myth.

 The Oak-Tree Goddess, brown Rhea, bore him,
upon a hillside in a brushy shelter,
a place so dense that neither wolf nor boar
entered to disturb his infant slumber,
nor would the Arcadian women hear
his cries as they descended for water
to the banks of Eileithyia. Sacred
the place is still, Titan Rhea’s child-bed.

 Alone in dark of moon, Rhea strode down
to cleanse herself of ichor’d afterbirth,
and to bathe the newborn child of thunder.

 …

But He Is Dead!

 by Brett Rutherford

     From Callimachus, Epigram II

When I said, “Heraclitus, my old friend —”
     you interrupted, “But he is dead!”
Then I stood thunderstruck. Of course
     he died so many years ago.
How far from Hallecarnassos
     have his ashes drifted now?

 But when I said his name,
    I heard a Nightingale begin
his shift. The sun had set,
     just as we two so many times
lingered and talked beneath this tree,
     until the day had faded and gone.

 Not the same bird, most certainly,
    but its descendant — O my heart!
O Nightingale, be still!

 

An Easy Choice

 by Brett Rutherford

     from Callimachus Epigram V

“Hey, Timon, thou spout of spite,
which do you hate more: the Light
of Day, or the Darkness?”

                                         “Darkness,”
the dour one replied, “For there are more
of your kind where the sun never shines.”

Insincere

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Callimachus Epigram IV

If after saying “farewell” to me —
not a good wish but a poison arrow —
you turn to my friends, and, laughing,
mock me when I am just out of hearing.

 Far better for you to keep that orifice shut.
You have too many teeth. Hypocrisy
has its way with canines and molars,
and soon enough you’ll lose them all.

 The only teeth you’ll keep are those
whose aches are near deadly, and which
they call, with bitter irony, “wisdom.”

 

A Good Boy

 by Brett Rutherford

     from Callimachus Epigram VII

He thought to earn merit
from gods, and in the eyes of men,
by tending the grave of one
who was not his ancestor dear.

 Cruel she had been to him,
    his father’s second wife.
And what did he get
     for his trouble?

 The cursèd stone broke
    and fell upon him.
His brains spilled out;
     the flowered garland
still in his clenched hand.

 Step-sons, beware! Even the grave
of she who hated you, hates on.

 

 

Centipede Apocalypse

 

by Brett Rutherford

And just like that
the night sky lifted up,
curled up and halfway
over. It was no sky
but a roof. Who knew?

 And there he stood,
two-eyed and pale
and grimacing. I froze
in terror while others fled.
His darting orbs followed
the escaping horde.

He knows we are here,
that maybe millions
call this a world. A hole
a million miles across
opened, and sounds
like trumpets issued forth.
It was his mouth, and this
the call to judgment.

The sky resumes
its familiar blackness.
Manna still falls
and feeds us,
but we have gone mad.

Our days are numbered
and we know it.
Doom tramples over us.
The day of wrath has come.

 

Best of All Possible Worlds

 

by Brett Rutherford

Doctor, I'm glad
you had time to squeeze me in.
No, nothing physical.
My limbs are all intact.

I am far past
adolescence
as you can see:
segment after segment,
a full hundred.

Sex life? Oh that's
no problem.
Here under the carpet
the living's easy.
Food falls, and fluids
ooze to puddled ponds
where there's enough
for everyone.
The human never vacuums.
We party all night,
and as for sex,
God! I've lost count.

It must be my mind
that's gone all wrong
on me. I just go through
the motions of eating,
wrestling with my brothers,
topping the others
in the orgy crevices.

They say you help,
that on this couch
I can talk it through.
I can hardly say it,
what troubles me.

I sleep, too long,
and far too deep,
and in my dreams
I am pursued
by thousand-legged
monsters. Yes,
millipedes! There,
I have said it.

They seem so real,
I wake up screaming.
I know there is no
such animal.
Mythology, I know.
Old fairy tales.

Tell me, doctor,
what is a centipede to do?

 

Concerning the Soul

by Brett Rutherford

Because you dream
of parents gone,
dead siblings, the face
and voice and sayings
of a wise grandmother,

you imagine them alive
somewhere, solid, fine,
and feasting as never
they fed in a starved life,

 or as flimsy ghosts
in a tinsel harp heaven
where white-toast angels
attend them, all this

 in desperate wish
that you had a soul
and would travel with it
to the same beyond.

Wishing does not
make it so. The soul,
subtracted, is not the line
between a body
and a corpse.

The soul is a word
denoting no thing
existent in time
or space, an object
of language only.

No thing is
Nothing, and from Nothing
it is not permitted to say
that something comes.
Of Nothing, no substance,
quality or power adheres.

Note how a fool is made
by adding a capital letter
to lower-case nothing —
nothing, null, zero,
Nothing, ah sublime,
extant omnipotent —
as though to kick upstairs
the non-existent into
a respectable place.

Like floating reefs
or fatal Sirens,
beware the lure
of floating abstractions!

  

Dizzying Considerations

 

by Brett Rutherford

1

"Infinite" means only
"unimaginably large."
Infinite in number
cannot apply
to any existent thing,
for if it were,
it would crowd out
all other existing things,
filling the universe
with copies of itself,
cancelling me,
this poem,
and you who read.

2

Infinite in duration
by which we mean
a thing is eternal —

the arrogance
of meteor alone
in space, of smug
planets whose mass
has cleared their path
in endless dull orbit —

the first amoeba's
clear intent
to outlive every one
of his kind —

the urge of every tree
to grow forever
and devour the sun
that feeds it —

means only
that one becomes
"unimaginably old,"

until the sweep
of space and time,
the tug of gravity,
collapses all,

one bubble gone
among the many.

 

At Tower Records

Photo from Wikimedia

by Brett Rutherford

 It was one of those years
when Manhattan shone
not white with diamonds
but lurid crimson, Masque
of the Red Death, tombs
filling as fast as luxury
apartments. A year

 of averted gazes when
a particular face flashed
eyes you thought you knew
but that deathly pallor,
sunken cheeks, unsteady
gait made you look away,

 that year you read
obituaries first, that year
you could not count
on two hands the friends
you lost. One Sunday,

 lost in my thoughts
at the cutout record bins
of Tower Records
(the classical annex of course),
in quest of Handel operas
no one had sung since
Handel’s own day, or some
obscure Russian symphonist

 I saw a man whom no one saw,
or everyone pretended not
to see. Rail-thin in shabby clothes,
torn sneakers, he hurried
from bin to bin, all bent
on the big boxes: Wagner’s Ring
(Furtwangler and Solti, no less),
one each of all the Verdi greats,
a heap of Sutherland and Sills
in all the bel canto must-haves.

 The albums piled
up to his chin, he tottered,
shambled, and pulled himself
to the counter. A few in line
gave way; others behind
pulled back at the sight
of the tell-tale lesions
upon his neck and arms.

 He paid cash. It was all
he could do to carry
the heap of albums away.
No one spoke. Eyes turned
so as not to watch
as he passed the store’s
long windows, to where
a waiting cab, trunk
open, swallowed up
the opera horde
and its new owner.

 We turned back,
each and all,
to our searches.
I knew too well
what this was about.
He had come into
a little money, his life
insurance cashed in,
most likely, and by god,
he was going to die
owning every damn opera
he had ever wanted.

 He would go out like a diva.

 

Thirteen Scorpions

by Brett Rutherford

     A Monologue of The Emperor Qian Long (1711-1799)

I bid you welcome
to the Summer Palace,
to this, my garden
behind the Hall of Paintings,
and now that you,
Father of the Jesuits,
have learned enough Chinese
to dine in my presence,
we shall dispense with bowing,
kowtowing, and the like.

We can speak now,
man-to-man,
though it best be said
as god to man
for unlike your god
who is infinitely
receding, I am here.

I am the Son of Heaven.
For as long as I can recall
I was the Son of Heaven.
Father and Grandfather
Yong Zheng and Kang Xi
thought themselves so,
but they were merely
openers of the way;
they conquered and pacified,
thrust Manchu virtue
into the soft Han underside,
gave steel
where only bamboo
had sufficed.

Truly, I am the most
interesting person
who has ever lived
(or so the eunuchs
daily remind me).
I have composed,
or signed my name to
some forty thousand
poems; well-schooled
in martial arts,
I could break a man
in two, bare-handed.

I hunt. The deer tremble.
I make war. Unruly tribes
flee back to their borders.
My name and seal
are on ten thousand vases.
My visage has been painted
by European as well as Han.
My armies have gone as far
as Lhasa, whose Dalai Lama
bows to me —
                        What’s that?
Disaster in Burma? Vietnam
refusing to bend the knee?
You are impertinent, Holy Father —
time will tell — but here,
the servants come with tea,
dainties and dumplings.

Let us leave politics, and speak
of other things. You know,
I have learned to speak Tibetan,
and their Yellow Church priests
shall be in charge of my tomb
when Heaven takes me.

But tell me true, Jesuit Father,
how just as Manchu conquered Han
yet all of China has ravished me
with art and music and poetry
so that I scarcely have time for war,

does not your little god pall
before the sight of our mountains,
the mists on the Yellow River?
You eat like a Chinaman. I see
the way you eye that eunuch
(I will send him ’round
with the rest of the dumplings
if that pleases you? It does?)

Is China not
the world’s true center? Not Rome!
Although I ban your faith
and god, and god’s wife, and son,
and those ever-bleeding saints
are not permitted here — you stay.

You collect our pottery,
Song, Tang, Yuan, and Ming.
Calligraphy eludes you
and yet two hundred scrolls
of painted landscapes
have found their way
into the Jesuit dwelling.
Does China not always win,
like a great concubine,
by merely standing by in beauty?

Now, walk this way with me —
hand me the cricket jar,
Old Chen! — and we shall see
in this otherwise barren
rock garden, one standing stone.
gongshi, we call these —
how weathered and worn
and full of cavities it is!
Step up to the boundary
of crushed cinnabar
and look close! They come!
They come! Cringe not,
for the thirteen scorpions
are bound to the stone
and the gravel around it.
It is their universe.

Wonder you may
how I have ruled
for sixty years; how none
have raised a hand against me
and succeeded.

One duke, one general,
one martial arts fanatic,
two who called themselves
my brothers and blood-princes,
four who put up banners
and called me usurper:
see how they scurry
away from my shadow!
Emirs and khans and kings,
four I did not behead or slice
now wriggle here and rip
at another’s bodies
with fangs and venom’d tails.

The one on top? You know
I had three empresses, consorts
fifteen, and half a dozen
concubines. Only one was bad,
and there she basks. Nothing
would please her more than progeny.
A concubine
the only female on an island
with twelve male reprobates.
They will have nothing
to do with her. Ironic, no?

They will go on this way
forever, so long
as my hand feeds them
now and then.
Watch, as I lift this jar
that contains their dinner,
as I rattle the lid
just ever so slightly,
like cats they come running.

Step back — the cinnabar
line is poison to them
and they cannot pass it.
Old Chen, come hold
the Jesuit Father up.
He seems a little dizzy.
Is your taste too fine
to witness thirteen scorpions
fight over and eat
a solitary cricket?
It is only an insect.
It is their favorite food.

The dumplings, perhaps,
have made you sleepy.
Rest on this garden seat.
Is this not like
the place you call Purgatory,
where evil-doers reside
on a mount of their iniquities?
Just such a thing, in miniature,
a Daoist master made for me.

Come, take a look
as I uncover the victim.
What say you? Empty?
Why so it is.
Look deeper, Father
of the foreign devils’ god.
Slough off your priestly
robes, your cross and jewelry.
Do you not feel the change?
Catch him, old Chen!

I am the Son of Heaven.
I have always been
the Son of Heaven.
I am the most interesting man
who has ever lived.

And you —
     whom I hold
     in my hand and toss
     into the hungry horde —
you
are a cricket.

 

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.