War Story

by Brett Rutherford

Warned not to pay mind

to the old man

in the wheelchair

when his eyes went funny,

I listened anyway.

"Hungry?" he said.

"I'm never hungry

the way I was

when we got lost

on the Eastern Front.

"Russians swept in,

we, after. We chewed

on roots and leaves

as we hid in the forest.

We watched a house,

a one-room hovel,

as puffs of smoke

went up, then died.

"Gunshots we heard

in the dark,

and when we looked

at sunrise, the door

to the place was open.

Two bodies lay side

by side in the dirt.

"We waited. We waited.

So famished we almost

crawled, at last we dared

go to the farmhouse.

"That smell. A pot —

steam rose from it

when we lifted the lid.

'Soup,' I shouted,

'My God! It's soup!

Cabbage and potatoes,

onions and meat!'

"I put the ladle in.

I lifted up.

It was a human foot

at the bottom.

"Young man:

we ate it anyway."

Alone in the Temple

by Brett Rutherford

      The Emperor Li Yü,
           after the death of Empress Zhou

Lord Buddha, why?

Silence.

Incense rising,

a vertical line

no breeze disturbs.

It is as though the world

stopped breathing.

That there is no answer,

is an answer.

Lord Buddha, why?

Look everywhere

inside our realm.

Are not the finest

peaks surmounted

by your temples?

Have we not carved

you into cliffs, filled

grottoes with shrines?

Do we not have as many

monks as scholars?

As many Bodhisattva

figures as soldiers?

As many stupas

as bell and drum towers?

As many prayer wheels

as chariots?

Those who would topple the last

of Tang -- they do not know you.

We fight, but of all deaths

this one death I cannot

accept with calm resolve.

She is gone! Her shroud

is even now rolled up

and carried to the chamber.

I must watch as her ashes

rise to the heavens.

Have you not taught

there is no peace

until there is no will

to war? I have no will

to war. Love was my

barricade. It fell.

The people, in loving me,

loved you, What now,

Lord Buddha, what?

Who the illusion,

you, or I?

          (Written to follow Poem 21 of my Li Yu cycle)

The Interruption

by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yü, poem 21

He had made
a new dress for her,
and things to match:
light-colored green her gown
silk thin as gauze,
head-band a string of clouds
of gleaming mother-of-pearl,
the necklace of jade beads
which she bites playfully
instead of letting them drop
to grace her girlish
figure. Why does she frown?

He has done everything for her
that a secret lover can. More
is impossible. Old wives frown,
and ministers find texts
that would condemn them.
And what is better, after all,
than the love that is not
allowed? Autumn has come;
with longer nights, they could
stay together longer.
Why does she hesitate?
She has not even thanked him.

What woman else
would be so dressed
and undressed by her lover?

This is a new spot, not far
from the Imperial gardens.
It is more dangerous for them,
and all the more delicious.
A tall tree, uncommon,
drops yellow fruit unknown
beyond the tropics.
One could hear them fall.
Peeled, they yield
erotic fragrances.

Just as the Emperor reaches
to embrace his slave and idol,
the door bursts open, a man
in shadow lunges in,
then kneels. Li Yu
recognizes Counselor Lin.

“Rise!” he says. “How dare you
interrupt me here?”

“Your M-Majesty!” the man stutters.
He does not look at the woman.

“Who knows that I am here?”

“Those sworn to protect you
always know where you are.
Would you not wish it so?”

“I wish to have secrets,”
the Emperor shouts.
“Are you not a man yourself?”

“The Empress knows all,”
Lin ventures to tell him.
“She has known for a week!”

At this, a small shriek
issues from the cringing girl.
She removes the head-band,
the string of jade. 

“Majesty, I have known you
since the day of your birth.
And so it is that I am asked
to be the one to tell you …”

“To tell me, what?”

“That Empress Zhou
your queen and ours,
was found dead an hour ago.”

 

The Beloved Speaks ("The Assignation")

 by Brett Rutherford

    after Li Yü, poem 20

The flowers were bright
     (and might have lit my way like lanterns)
but the moon was diffused in light mist.
Cool, but not too cold,
that was the best night to go to my lover.
Trembling I trod the perfumed stones,
step upon step amid the night-blooms.
I held in one hand the golden-threaded shoes,
in the other his scroll of urgent summoning.

South of the newly-painted hall,
in the appointed place I met him.
His face was turned away and upward
as though he searched the moon's face,
or with his hawk-fierce eye, some dove
asleep on a still and leafy branchlet.

At first, I leaned against him, shivering;
my pale arms could not encompass
the sweep of his cloaked broad shoulders.
He made a sound that might have been
my name, or merely sighed, exhaling.
I said, “I cannot come as often now,
so tonight you must love me twice as hard.” 

The Hut

by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yü, poem 19

Like bandits we meet
at an abandoned hut.
We pretend to be peasants,
engaged in some illicit
love affair. This is our game.
She plays the bamboo flute, not well,
but I delight at her fingers at play
as she creates a new melody.

The glances she steals, the way
she looks at me, as though
I were a new bridegroom,
enchant me. I feel as high
as the sea-waves in autumn,
as full as a rain-cloud ready
to burst. Our love-cries rise,
embroidering the night sky
with comets and falling stars.

They are saying I am no Emperor,
that our dynasty has been demoted
to a mere kingdom, that I must send
my brother as prince, a hostage
almost certainly; to this Song king
who calls himself an emperor.
They say I only care
about love and music and poetry.

Guilty! After such ecstasy, all
is as nothing to me. Or all is one
within me. The whole wide world
is a day-dream in springtime.

  

Waiting for Her

 by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yü, poem 18

The rain falls so hard, I squint
and cannot uncurl my eyebrows.
The red petals, undone, are washed
away in streams and rivulets
until I cannot see them.
Spring floods are underway.

Streams will be high,
some paths, unpassable.
Even when rain is done,
I hear nothing.
The copied key inside
undoes the one her captors
made to hide her. Free,
she can move like a ghost
on any moonless night.

No sign of her. Incense has burned
down to the nub and seal. The light
of my night-candle is nearly gone.
How much longer? What agony
that if I go to sleep, she comes
to me anyway, but cold, serene,
as thin as a cloud, untouchable.

The Prisoner

 by Brett Rutherford

     from Li Yü, poem 17

I have found her! As in a sad tale,
an evil fairy prevailed.
The world’s most beautiful woman
is confined to a room so narrow
two arms can almost touch
the heavy and well-planked walls.

A tiny terrace extends from it,
and there I saw her at last,
leaning at risk of a fall
over the balustrade, too high,
bare rocks below a certain death
to anyone foolish enough to jump.
All this, and on the palace grounds!

I found the door, concealed
within a grotto, and there she stood!
Food there was, and a tiny brazier,
all the best and the finest tea.
She had fine garments here,
all the jewels one could wish for,
even a small bronze Bodhisattva:

not a cell, like one
a Buddhist nun
or monk would occupy,
but a doll-house
pavilion for one.

Her rival did not intend it so,
but it was a temple to our passion.
O narrow bed! All pillows thrown aside,
she drew me quietly there. We stood,
we knelt, we melted like ingots
in the fire that purifies. I held the key
to the room in my hands. She took it.
We laughed, and planned our future.
We looked at one another, and now I knew
what a conspiracy was, and what its vows.

But as for here and now,
the bed just wide enough for one,
is also wide enough for two.

The Empress, Alone

 

by Brett Rutherford

     after Li Yü, poem 16

She has given up waiting.
In lamplight, her face
will not even fill a mirror:
a sliver of brow and cheek
glow pale, like the new moon’s
sickly crescent.
                           To do her hair,
with that elaborate coif
of cicada and phoenix,
that once so pleased him,
the jade pin, and the silver
one, lay ready on her table.
She picks them up.
She puts them down.

What is the use?
He is watching somewhere,
or someone is watching
on his behalf.

"Tell me: Is the Empress unhappy?"
"Tell me: Does she bother
to make herself presentable?"

The lazier she grows,
the more disheveled she is,
the less he is likely
to come to her.

Can she give him
another heir?
Does she want to?
No one even asks.

The double curtains
that brought him unannounced
so many evenings
into her chamber,
are as still as stone.

Her eyes dart up and out
to the palace and its terraces.
No lights. All are asleep.
He did not choose her.
He did not choose anyone.

He will not come. 

As the flower fades,
as the fickle wind
goes where it wills,
all must change without her.

When a wheel turns,
the axle is compelled to follow,
as it draws up water
from the golden well.

Will she drink,
or will she leave the cup
unemptied?

It is better to have wine,
and to wake up forgetful.
Will the morning sun care
that she begged for Spring?

Worrying is worse
than any sickness.

The Other Woman

by Brett Rutherford

      after Li Yü, poem 15

The cherry petals came too late;
they carpet the steps,
but the Empress does not notice them.

I sit by the bed and tend
    the covered brazier;
its fire is almost gone
    and the tea already made
is lukewarm now.
No matter, for she has taken none.

A year already since grief arrived.
Each day that dawns
without the young prince's laughter
is as sad as the one before.

Being beautiful for me,
or for her own pleasure
seems a thing of the past.
Her face looks wrong,
the double-knotted hair
off-kilter; her eyes
are almost blank,
like the thin clouds
that mark a gloomy day.
Dried tears spot-stain
her vermilion vest.

My back is turned.
Why do I yearn so bitterly
for the younger face
that is the same face?
Why do I think of her
as I day-dream
at the window lattice?

Invocation of the Demons

 by Brett Rutherford

     On the possession of the San Francisco Police
     by Demons, October 31, 1967

     from the poem-cycle, "City Limits",
     a rant composed at age 20

Look into your streets, o city,
look past the pearly teeth of your
          laughing
Hallowed night,
you farms and suburbs with your
          pumpkin ghouls,
look to the neon metropole,
rip off its lustered streets,
     peer deep into the brimstone heart,
     dark unto the twilight of Democracy.

Fly, you borrowed myths, you dawn-age demons —
     cast your broomsticks and your comet’s tail
          over the hazy bay and its bridge,
dance your round on the lonely Chateau d’If,
     (Alcatraz Island hidden in mists),
cast your Carpathian woe on the fog-bound peaks,
bow out the violin’s call to the sulfurous maw,
          the sulfurous light in the park.
Where Moloch awakens, the leaf of eucalyptus
     dries and withers by the green pool,
     the slope of runaways huddled on blankets.

The face of the stars is blurred with the
          enactment of Western demonology:
at play in the night, cascading through the
          Dippered Way,
the phantoms of dread prodigal visions descend.
Ishtar, Thoth, and Baal careening,
Jahweh in his silence mocking the awaiting
          synagogues;
A horned Christ, Pan and Orpheus aroused
     as nuns collapse in ecstasy.

They come, the sky is heavy with them.
     (as if for rain the leaves upturn
     their soft and fertile undersides.)
They have come for the Ship of State,
     The stars of the flag will not contain them.
Here is the bloody Kali with twigs in her hair —
Listen, she is a wind by the Stanyan Gate.
Tonight, as the good white folk sleep oblivious,
as the men of the Mission toss and turn.
as Chinatown nods off, as Fillmore rage-dreams,
the delicate succubae descend on one and all,
   engendering demons from wrath and avarice.

König! König! Astaroth! God’s blood, thou
Bairn o’ Satan, God’s blood down the hairy
Heavens, bring on the streaming millionems
of the demon’s brood, the leaky umbrella
of innocence, the lust of unslakable virgins.
Satan himself! San Francisco summons you!

In nomine Snow White I conjure the evil which is
     whoredom with any dwarf of the mind
In the name of the tongue I conjure the evil
     of the meaningless words that are Death,
     that are dominion for the mindless
over the lands and the slippery limbs of the
               babes —

in the name of the mind I conjure
     the learned professor
     (oh, he has published widely)
     he only says “Nothing means anything,”
and for this, Chaos bows to him.

König! König! Soutek or Set! Aye, men,
There be bristling demons in the park.
          God’s blood, mun, God’s blood.
     Kali embracing Truman Capote!
     Ruby-carved minions! Fu Manchu!
          Lilith riding Rod McKuen!
     Make way for The Eater of the Dead!
     Mary Baker Eddy! Werner von Braun!
City of Night, Berg of Walpurgis, San Francisco!

Riding the hallowed night,
borne on the dark moon,
     I conjure the slaughter god,
the bane of ultimate hippie, the charnel cord
               of America:
in the name of the hand I conjure the evil
               which is Fear
               which is the King of Evil
     Fear of the dark at the top of the world
     Fear of the Other   is   Fear of the Self
     Fear of Touch       is   Fear of Love
                         is
               Fear of the Word

Fear a bond which is one and together a chain
Fear an umbilical mesa where insensitive
               millions perish,

O that the world would dissolve in the touch of  
               two hands,
               that the multicolored children would
               entwine their arms in a round dance,
               that the sweet-limbed boys would shun
                    the games of war
               and love each other in the summer night
               and refuse to ever fight again,
               that Man for an infinite moment would
               dwell in his own house
                    which is Joy

König! König! King who is Fear, Sabaoth!

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.