Devil Dogs

by Brett Rutherford

Worst birthday yet,

rained-over, dark,

jostle of umbrellas

and the hiss of tires

on Sixth Avenue.

I have no money.

My two press helpers

will have to wait

if no check comes

from those who owe.

I am not sure

of dinner. The rent

is paid, just barely.

How anyone lives

in Manhattan

without a trust fund

is still a mystery.

Still, the press runs.

Papers pile up

for folding. A fast

hundred dollars

could walk in the door

at any moment.

I wonder about

the cast iron building

across from my loft.

Typesetters are there

with old linotypes,

printers like me

working late nights

sometimes. Do they

go through these

weekly agonies?

Probably.

When I stop the press,

Claudia and the other

are huddled together

at the window sill.

Matches are being lit:

what? smoking, here,

in this firetrap?

I go to see, and

"Happy Birthday!"

regales me.

"We had no money,"

Claudia tells me.

"But we

improvised."

I look down to see

candles, tiny,

twenty-five,

straddling two,

minuscule

chocolate

cylinders,

cake-pastry known

as "Devil Dogs."

I weep with joy

remembering.

Vision at Sunrise

by Brett Rutherford

     San Francisco, 1967

Neither majestic nor unexpected
     have the sun and I
risen pale and cast in fog,
     largest to the eye
on rising, dearest when our
     insensate world, cooling,
permits it to set.

Our shadow is lithe, portends what agility
     there is
in having climbed on fiery pillars in the east;
our shadow is long, unclouded, full of promise,
our squat and burning noon-time,
     self- consuming,
is not upon us, and the glint of optimism
cools our advent. Offertory psalms are wafted
gently, lest we rise not, warm not,
lest you and I, sun, make them not see.

We are of self-expending fire, of the same stuff
          and orb —
     It is they who rise and set, they
          of the passions —
we are of one long swell of perpetual inhalation,
we will die only ultimately while they are
          altogether
     dead and resurrected in their starlit
bone heaps.

But you and the star in me are chained,
at the stone ramp we are defiled and painted,
and the feathered witches pluck out
          our hearts
     and offer them up in our own names.

How can the same sun
be beacon of my life,
and altar of my sacrifice? 

—from the poem-cycle City Limits.

Haight Street

by Brett Rutherford

I sat up in the middle of the night, from a dream in which someone (not sure who) was telling me, "You have to revise 'City Limits' and republish it. It was the work that established you as a New York poet."

As you know, I obey my dreams. Indeed, when I arrived in New York City in 1969 as a 22-year-old and went to Emilie Glen's poetry salon to make my debut as a Greenwich Village poet, my portfolio was small indeed. And much of it was the first burst of poems I had written during my 1967 stay in San Francisco where I lived in the Haight Ashbury and wrote for an underground newspaper there.

By the end of October of that year, some city fathers decided they had had enough of the hippies, and I witnessed police officers beating people on the street. The first time I saw this, I was traumatized, and I need not say that my image of America was altered forever. A few weeks later, on Halloween night, I had a featured reading at the I and Thou coffeehouse on Haight Street, and in attendance was my best friend, Tom Fitzpatrick, who was leaving for Vietnam the next morning. We thought we would probably never meet again.

Two things happened that night that can never be forgotten. First, I was heckled in the middle of my reading by Charles Manson. Then, we were all trapped in the coffeehouse for several hours while the police outside were beating and arresting everyone who looked like a hippie.

I fled San Francisco shortly after that. It took two years for me to write a long poem combining the horrors of the events and the horrible irony of saying goodbye to your best friend because he is going off to fight for the country that wants you dead. (The happy outcome of that is that Fitzpatrick is still my friend, and he has visited me in every place I have lived over all these decades.)

The poem, "City Limits," is about 18 pages long, and finishing it in New York, it was my first "masterpiece" in the original sense of the word -- a work that one completes to prove mastery of one's art. Whenever I had featured readings I read it, and I am sure it overwhelmed audiences, even if the long rants within it, half Whitman and half Ginsberg, did not make a lot of sense. It's a windbag of a poem. But it really is how I got noticed in New York.

Today I have done the bidding of the Muses and I have revised it. It will go in my next book. I will share here just one section, where my 20-year-old self witnesses police violence:

2

HAIGHT STREET

I am watching
the long-haired boy and the
     guitarist on the doorstep.
The blue, club-laden police
     approach them.
One cop addresses them. The
     guitarist moves,
moves away into the crowd.

Then out of nowhere a raised arm.
The boy reels back under the club’s arc,
his raised hands locked in polished silver cuffs,
blood, great streams of it flow down his face--
one long uncomprehending fawn-like glance
     of horror buried as the club falls
his temple red and body trembling to the ground,
          the foot of the man
like some triumphant hunter posed, seeks the
               neck,
blood black like oil, dark in the streetlight.

The other bulwark of democracy drives back the
          screaming observers —
four girls are not spared his club.
After a while the hungry van arrives, they
     vanish
blue-black and burning eyes, crazed hunter
     dragging their prey,
they bag him for “resisting arrest.”

I stood witness and watched this happening.
Two hundred years of history collapsed.
My land, my Revolution, my salvador of centuries,
America I believed the only hope alternative,
inheritor of waning Europe’s blood and fears.
Is it come to this--that laughing ghouls
Like gorged priests and scheming despots
molest the least of your brethren for your
     greater glory?

O would there were god, Columbia,
and if that god looked over you,
     how I would pray to it tonight!

Do you think this is a small thing?
“Get over it,” I hear. “You lie,”
another says, “for your own politics.”
I could have touched that blood;
I could have tasted it. I could
have shouted and been beaten, too.

Visiting the Dowager

 by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Li Yü, poem 14

What does this old woman know
     that I do not?
I am Emperor of Everything
     but cannot translate why

her hair, already streaked with gray,
falls to her shoulder in disarray,
or why the furrow between
her eyebrows is deeper yet
than what it was before.

What cause has she
to be unhappy?
She has her own servant,
an out-of-the-way
pavilion well-situated.
She wants no company.
Many are unaware
she is still alive.
Comfort surrounds her.
I pay my respects
at suitable intervals.

Putting aside the gifts
I brought for her —
green tea, a scroll
with my new poems,
and a fine crackle-glaze
vase with dragons —

I aim a gaze, quizzical
and open my hands,
imploring her. Instead
of addressing me,

she leans one cheek upon
one opened hand, pale
as a bamboo shoot,
and then inclines her head,
eyes shut,
toward the residence.

Word came to her just now,
as she leaned over the balcony.
Servants below have passed
it all to one another in a string
of echoes. Through tears she says:

“Son of my son,
go to the Empress —
your child has died.”

 

The Forbidden Palace

 by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Li Yü, Poem 13

Some silly concubines believe
the Palace is the Universe.
Yet once, each arrived here
knowing nothing. At first,
they sent packages back home
to sisters, grandmothers.
Then they forgot,
     as every new day
     became a forever.

I hear them chattering
of how some distant hill
marks the Palace boundary.
Then on a clearer day
another hill behind it
presents itself, and that
is the world’s far edge.

In truth, I cannot walk
or ride from one end to another
in a single day. It just goes on
as ancestors appended hill
and valley, stream and forest.
Paintings are made
showing its lakes, gardens,
pavilions and vistas.
No scroll is wide enough, or high,
to do my palace grounds justice.
This truly is the heart of the world.

Yes, armies go forth;
     some come back shattered.
Yes, taxes and tributes come,
     and strangers kow-tow and beg.
In places I have never heard of,
they say the word “China” and sigh.

Strange it is
that the heart of China sighs,
and knows not for whom or why.
I cannot touch the hills.
The sky’s clouds defy my reach.
The water today
is unclear and cold:
the tea will not be right.

All summer I’ve been distracted.
I am thinking of the one
I am no longer allowed to see.
The leaves were still green
when she was taken from me,
and soon they will blaze red.

By trick and subterfuge,
an order forged, my seal affixed,
she has been carted off by night.
The Empress will not will her death,
but keeps her far away somewhere.
I dare not speak, I dare not ask.
It is as though she had never existed.

The opening chrysanthemum,
as it drinks in the sun,
mocks me. It closes, satisfied.
Swans at the edge of vision
fly, each with his mate up high.
No one gives them orders.

I am alone. I call for no one.
The concubines had might as well
be cemetery crows for all
I care about their caresses now.

The moon tugs earth and tides.
The mocking breeze pulls
at my curtains randomly.
Brush to paper,
I do not have the will to write.

I wait for something
     to mean something.

Down South (Revision)

by Brett Rutherford

 In Li Yü's 12th poem, he thinks about how, far in the south of China, spring was already well underway. I did my own version of this poem already in 2013, so here it is with only a couple of minor changes.

DOWN SOUTH

After Li Yü, Poem 12

Down South, they know what to do with springtime.
There, when my thoughts turn away
from duty and empire, I imagine myself,
where the spring is already well in progress.

Now every lake floats the pleasure boats,
the er-hu fiddles hum like bees, flute girls
exchange shy looks with the young scholars.
The green-faced rivers are drunk with willows,
towns dust-clogged with trees' yellow catkins.
More flowers bloom than eye or hand can capture.

Busy are those who watch this blossoming,
trying in vain with brush to draw it,
so quickly is it here and gone.
Busier still are their sleepless nights
when one beside another they lay
entwined, and the high stars call them.

2013, 2022 rev.

Sweeping the Tombs

 by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Li Yü, Poem 11

So many trees above,
almost no sky. Lazy,
I linger alone in the hut
the caretaker lives in.
Ancient pines moan,
whisper my father’s name,
and his, and his.

This early April night
might go on forever. Warm now,
a moment later I am shivering.
Cold nights will soon be over.

The Feast of Qingming
ended just yesterday.
With my own hands I swept
the tomb of my father,
and his, and his.

Others swept clean of leaves
and sand and pebbles,
the graves of imperial uncles,
of consorts whose names
nobody remembers,
and of several dread dowagers
whose ghosts demanded
     extra incense
and more circling 'round
as the prayers went up.

Ancestors appeased,
the earth is free
to mark the end of Spring.

The out-of-focus moon
is its own ghost tonight.
Clouds roll, and down the slope
a breeze torments
the budding peach and apricot.

Who is impatient for summer?
And who, down there,
sits on a swing and chatters,
laughing and gossiping?

My heart is one with myself,
but for my land and its people,
ten thousands threads of thought
go out to who knows where
for who knows what response. 

Even the Son of Heaven
cannot find room enough
to untangle one small web
of one night’s thoughts.

Given the whole world
to unravel it, I still would not
have any idea
what I am supposed to do.

Those below earth
and in the sky, lend me
at least, if nothing else,
a calm demeanor.

 

Making Love to the Empress

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yü, Poem 10

She was ready, but I could hardly wait.
I burst into her chamber, just as the last
of her preparations for love were underway.
I caught her fanning the censer
so that more sandalwood would blow
my way. She laughed, and that lilac-bud
of a little tongue circled her cherry lips
and moistened them. Before I could
turn to embrace her, one arm took up
the lute, and in her lap it went, a guard
against my haste. She tuned, oh, quickly!
to pretend to tune when she had tuned
before! and this to cool my ardor.
Forth the clean song issued –
ah, swan and peony, dove and cherry! —

I knelt to listen, and to aim
my upward-looking eyes into hers,
turned down to frets and fingering
(small darts of desire I thought I saw,
not just in melody,
but in the slight tremble she added
to every falling note.) A scent,
she must have meant to madden me,
rose and then faded from sleeves of gauze.
Why trick me with chemistry
when you have already conquered China?

And so we drank, and soon her cup
was tinged with wine, and fringed
with the hue of abducted cherry.
At last, the pi-pa put aside, the song
having reached its triple ending,
she lay there stretched, all limbs in view
upon the silk embroidered bed.
Oh, what is modesty, when thunder strikes
and blinds the eyes, unbearable!

When my sight cleared, and what I saw
I saw again, she parted her lips, and
from her mouth a cascade of red petals,
blew up and out. I nearly fainted.

 

Woman of Spring

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Li Yü, Poem 9.

Over the water
    the East Wind blows.
Over the hills
     the Sun holds on
a little longer.

Thanks to Spring,
I have more leisure time,
more hours for love
    and poetry.
Look: petals everywhere!
I leave them where they fall.

The drinking cups
     my artist friends abandoned,
tipped this way and that
by calligraphers and drummers,
flutists and lutenists,
some pink, some plum,
some celadon – mine
is the blue one, there —
their very scattering
around the old Zun vessel
empty now of wine:
this is a painting, too.

Somewhere a woman,
woman beyond empress,
lover or concubine,
visible to me only,
wakes from her long sleep.
She, too, is grateful
for the sun’s long days.
The false peach face
she put on all winter
is faded now. No servant
comes to attend
    to her appearance
and correct her unruly
hair-knot. Heedless
even of what she is wearing,

this woman, nameless to me
and not of my retinue or court,
goes where she wishes. Her hand
seems to bless the bright land.
Upon a placid lake she views
her own face and blushes not.
Will she come back, alone,
at dusk, to tell me everything?

If I were painting this,
     I would place here there,
half-in, half-out of the pavilion,
arms and elbows
leaning across the balustrade.

Will she come as I bid her?
Will she take wine, or bring me some?
Will she at last, whisper
     her name into my ear?

  

 

The Floating Things

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yü, Poem 8

The name of a thing
is not the thing.

A jade tree stands
at courtyard's front,
yet leaves that drop from it
are not hard stones
that can be carved
into dragons and lions.

They say the grass
is strewn with gems
when frost kisses it.
I reach for them
and my wet hand
is none the richer.

"To flower" means
making something new,
yet wilted peonies,
and stiff chrysanthemums
shame the garden,
like crones who came
to beg, and never left.

The moon, they say,
is full again.
Was it not full before?
Is this year's light
that shines from it
a newer thing, or just
the same old radiance,
shed from a tattered robe
in the night sky?

And if a thing's attributes
are not themselves
things in themselves,
moon just moon,
and flowers just flowers,
what thing is Youth
if pulled apart
from years and bodies?

Can Heaven grant us
this thing we most crave:
to age not
and to be young forever?

 

 

Making Spring Happen

 by Brett Rutherford

after Li Yü, Poem 7

The sound of the little goat-skin drum
makes me want to write poetry.

Fools wait for the falling blossoms
before they say that Spring has come.
To find Spring, you must go early
and walk to the fields in search.
To love a flower that has bloomed
already, is to miss the flowering.

My love presents my favorite cup
with a supple hand. I see
no thumb. The blue-glazed
porcelain surrounds
an inner whiteness, a wine
so pure it has no color.

Is Spring delayed
if we drink and linger?
Does the Forbidden Garden
require the Emperor
to bless its blooming?

Girl, let us drink ourselves silly!
Just as my poem will come
to the beat of a little drum,
the buds and flowers, too,
leaning against the palace,
will listen and follow.

 

Dancing on Autumn Leaves

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Emperor Li Yü, Poem 6

She has come, as I bid her,
to the unruly pavilion
where leaves and fallen petals
carpet her footsteps.

The sun is but three hours up
but still the Lovely One arrives,
a row of sleepy dancers
behind her,
suppressing laughter
as they move to no music,
but to the breeze itself,
the sway of pine branches.

I clap my hands.
She is a little drunk
from last night's merriment.
Her golden hairpin falls
and another must bow
to sweep it up for her.
Not quite so sure
of this step or that,
no tile or square to guide her,

she pretends to smell
an untouched flower,
     and just as well,
     as it is withered.
Fumbling, she tries again,
the wrong foot forward,

while I delight to hear
small feet unsure of step,
on autumn leaves arranged
by Master Wind.

Somewhere a flute and drum
strike up in another palace
(some being called
to early breakfast!)
Not for me, these sounds!
Shuffle, crackle,
slide, and spin,
whirl, little slippers, my
pantomimes of whim!

 

Crybaby

by Brett Rutherford

By the age of six,

I was programmed to cry.

A loud noise would do it.

A father's bruising slap,

most certainly, and so many

that my memory is wiped.

But this I recall,

a war of wills. One slap

on face or bottom

and my mother was rid of me

as I wailed and ran.

One day I read,

in the only book around

about "childish things"

and putting them aside.

So I walked up to her

and said, "Never again.

will you make me cry."

"You little brat! Just like

your father!" Slap! Slap!

I reeled. I bit my lip,

Tears came. I whimpered.

But I did not cry. Not then,

and never after. Self,

sovereign and free, I was.