Worse Every Day

 by Brett Rutherford

Witches and pedophiles
in pizza-shop basements,
Elders of Zion
with bearded Protocols,
rapists at the border
demanding to work
as strawberry pickers,
space lasers igniting
the unswept forests,
teachers conspiring
to teach actual history,
oceans not rising,
mass murders staged,
voting booths tampered
and thermometers, too,
pythons and lantern-flies,
COVID and monkey pox
all hoaxes to frighten you.

So things untrue
are truer than things
that are.
And now, just now,
polio is back,
and Palin, too?

Self-Epitaph (Callimachus)

by Brett Rutherford

from Callimachus, Epigram XXXVII

Of me it should suffice to say
“He was the son of Battus.”
You know the rest.
This is his tomb you pass.
But stay a while: he was
well-skilled in poetry,
and over the best of wine
did he not laugh with you?

Fear of Falling

 by Brett Rutherford

The man who would be king
avoids high parapets,
hill-tops and cliffs,
lest one swift wind,
or an assisting hand
should tip him over,

a parachute, twice-checked,
is always in reach
of his small hands
when his private jet zooms
from place to place.

He dreams in cold sweat
of a long fall from space,
not to some placid sea,
but to the very spot

where a sink-hole opens
to receive him.
So eager is Hell
to have him.

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.