Either-Or

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 86.

Aphrodite it is,
   soft, curved
     and ever-smiling,
     who lays forth
liquid flame,
compelling men
     to women’s charms.

Eros, it is, tender,
     tall, eluding
one day and giving
     the next,
the North Star
    of male-to-male
     affection.

What is my Pole,
    my inclination?
How shall the world
turn me, and to whom?
Boy Eros in Hermes guise,
or Cypris, bride and mother?

Whom will I see,
     curled up
beneath my morning
     blanket; whose
hair will drive me mad
     as my fingers run
through the abundant curls
of the exhausted sleeper?

     She, or He?

In dreams I’ve heard
the Morning Star sigh
as Aphrodite admits
she cannot outpace
her mischievous son.
Regarding me,
    she shakes her head
       confessing,
“Eros, the arrogant brat
     has won again!”

 

In A Name

 by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 81

What parent would name
his child in such a manner? —
Look, here comes Dionysus!
To be the butt of jokes,
provocative glances, drunken
jibes, and dangerous
assumptions is bad enough —
no blame to the young man
if he also possesses beauty,
eyelashes as fatal
    as the net to the fish.

Love-sick with self-deceit,
imagining souls bound
by a night of passion,
fellow victims, assist me!
You know the bitter-honey
     taste of rejection.
Pluck out my heart —
plunge it in cold water,
or, better yet, into
the colder jolt of a snow-bank

save me, for I have dared
    to look on Dionysus.
A river plunge, a waterfall,
    an iceberg ride
in Ultima Thule, anything!

You, laughing, passive witness
of youth and beauty,
help me to stop
     Love’s venom.

O Dionysus, to sleep
    with you is bliss.
But to wake with you?
I fear my heart
cannot contain it.

Hubris

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 101

Myiscus, one morning after,
dismisses my library
with a bored glance,
tugs at my sleeve
as I write a poem.

“Do you love me better
than those old epigrams
you collect and copy?”
he asks me, inserting
his question mid-stanza.

I put the stylus down.
“I lived for poetry
     until you struck me down.
Now I am not so sure.”

He laughs. In him,
some demon triumphs,
as if to boast,
     “See what I’ve done.
The proud scholar
     is now debased. My foot
is on his neck.
I’ve furrowed his wise brow
with lines of worry and jealousy.”

“Don’t be so smug,”
I caution him.
Nobody makes anybody
do anything
    unless some force compels.
Eros makes even Zeus
     do things his wife
would never countenance.”

Smugly, the boy leaves me
to go off to discus practice,
while I return to poetry.
This line,
     was it mine?
or did Callimachus,
as drunk with this love
as I am, say it already?

 

A Contest of Eyes

by Brett Rutherford

     After Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xi, 92

i

Why, despite his
apparent indifference,
does my head turn
to follow Hicetas
till he is out of sight?

The problem is
that I have seen his eyes.

My goose is cooked.
He’s nobody, really.
How can the lesser
bring down the greater?
Glue-traps on trees
capture the wild dove,
admittedly,
     but by and large,
sheep do not eat wolves,
crows do not catch scorpions,
ash does not smother fire.

Love cooks and stirs
everything. The soul
in love is upside-down.

I roast in beauty;
my soul runs down
into the fire.

ii

My eyes betray
my soul’s intent,
forsaking peace.
Like hounds, they burst
from out their sockets,
chasing the beloved.
And he, bird-lime
on his fair limbs,
catches the glance
and will not let it go.

Winged eyes discover
the wolves in the fold,
who, having been seen,
go skulking off. The crow,
whose eyes blink
sideways, taunts
the scorpion’s steady gaze
and turns away.

The pitying sky’s
tears fall and smother
the flame beneath
     the crumbling ash.

 

iii

No love at first sight
for the sightless.

What if we made
a merry bonfire
of these steaming orbs?
Trusting no more
the trickery of vision,
what if we crawled about
like errant crabs
in the receding tide,
selecting at random touch
whom we should love?

Could it be worse
than this cruel lottery
of colliding visions,
eyeballs circling
in long ellipses
like lost comets?

 

iv
Taking no lesson
from Oedipus,
far-knowing Tiresias,
or from the woe
of a Spartan bridegroom
begetting warriors
in total darkness,
I must accept my fate.

I see, I am seen.

My complaints are petty.
Hicetas, hold my gaze,
for in Hades, I am told
all eyes are averted.

  

After the Shipwreck, Love

 by Brett Rutherford

     After Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 84-85

The shipwreck’s vow to love,
on being rescued, the first he sees
if foiled by fickle Eros. A week
he languished, windless, idle,
and then for days storm-tossed
not only side-to-side but
upside down among the fishes;
ship dashed to splinters, all
of his fellows food to sharks;
he on his first voyage, alone
lived and came to shore.

A sight he was, barefoot,
and all but naked.
As it was dawn,
no one saw him.
Sheep he heard, but saw
    no shepherds.
Laughter of women came
where laundry lay on stones,
but when he approached
they had all fled somewhere,
as though some great bear
or a hungry Cyclops
     threatened them.

He chose among
the abandoned clothes
what modest raiment seemed
proper for a stranger’s entry
into the walled town.

The vow he made
to love whomever first
greeted him, came back
to his mind’s ear,
his own voice promising
against the howling gale.
Poseidon had spared him,
but what had Eros in store? 

“So be it,” he said.
“Be it crone or cripple,
beggar or brothel-maid,
I cast my lot to fate.”

And, lo! the first closed door
to a walled garden flew
open as if a wind willed it,
and there stood, bathing
from shoulders to feet
in fountain spray,
an eighteen-year ephebe,
chlamys and cap dropped
at water’s edge.

As quick as it had opened,
the door swung shut.
The lad laughed:
their eyes had locked
for just an instant,
enough for each,
if he willed,
to love the other
once and forever.

He went to an inn
across the way,
where ardent carousers
already at their wine
adopted his cause.

“As strangers come
from Zeus,” one said.
“here, take the last
coppers I’m carrying.
Another here will
    offer you lodging
and work enough
for strong hands.”

Cups raised,
    the Dionysian god
they praised.

One touched
the sleeve
of his tunic.
“That is my weave
you are wearing.
No matter — keep it.”

Now bread and oil,
lentils and meat
we put before him.
Once three wines full
he ventured to tell them
of that love oath which
the sea’s lord and Eros
bound him. “That house”
he pointed, “is where I saw
the most perfect being
in all the universe.
Pray, tell me the name
of the young man living there?”

Stone silence. Two faces
went red. Others choked down
whatever it was
     they wished to say.

“That house?”
     one asked him.
He nodded.
     All laughed.

“Welcome to Kos,
    and to ‘The Arrow’!”
the inn-host replied.
Arms reached
and went around
his shoulders.

“All day we sit and drink
and wait for that door
     to open.
We are a fellowship
     sworn to no jealousy.

Whom he chooses,
     we honor.
He walks as a godling
     among us.
Good luck to you, stranger!”

 

 

Burning Up

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 74

Cleobulus, dear friend,
this island of Kos
has really done me in.
The surfeit of children,
     bounty’s blessing,
has led to an overflow
of lusty, idling,
     superfluous young men.

I came here for peace of mind,
but what am I to do?
They come up to you
with those impudent faces,
dark eyes both mocking, imploring,
don’t you dare and will you please,

their eyebrows and lashes
     weird hieroglyphs.

So close to death am I
from all these love-burns,
I’d might as well carry
an urn beneath my arm.
Each time one smites me
with his glances, there
I can put my cinders,
ash and bone-shards
as I walk along.

When all that’s left of me
is a bronze urn
with little human feet,
smoldering, do me
the favor of a prompt burial.

But first, I pray you,
Cleobulos my confidant
immune to this kind of love,
take my plain urn —
letting no lads claim
a particle of trophy —

ignoring the hoots and howls
of mockery, take this
plain urn, soak it
three days in wine
(the redder the better)
and on that heart-dyed
verdigris inscribe my name
and just these words:

DRINK ME:
LOVE’S GIFT
TO DEATH.

 

 

 

Super Powers

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 63

The young men, smitten
at seeing themselves
mirrored in clear water,
are more than doubled
in beauty and power.

Their chests swell,
shoulders arch back,
biceps taut, fists
in a fighting posture.
Gods in themselves
they seem. Young

Heraclitus here
darts fire from his eyes.
So quick is he, that he
the thunderbolt of Zeus
could stop with a glance,
and, fire on fire, destroy it.

Diodorus, too,
attains heroic status.
Rising from marble bench
he says, “Not only
warmth my body grants
to inanimate stone,
but if I will it,
the stone will melt,
run off like a flow
at the forge of Hephaestus.

The two regard me,
notice me noticing
their lovely forms.
I burn. I melt.

Diasporas

by Brett Rutherford

People scattered
in a human cyclone
fall to strange places,
explode like pine cones
in a bonfire, seeds
spattering, shoots
rising up, roots
and trunk and branches
the aftermath
    of disasters.

Greeks fleeing
too small land,
too little soil
cover the map
with colonies,
city-state the envy
of adjacent empires.
The gods they carried
became everyone’s
alternate family.

China so huge
it exports its people,
a centuries-long
diaspora of misery:
sent to dig
the guano fields
of far Peru, to sweat
for the promise of gold
as railroad coolees,
to roll cigars
in the damp heat in Cuba.

Scots fleeing hunger
    and the Enclosure laws,
Irish, from the whip
    and starvation,
scattered from Nova Scotia
to Tierra del Fuego.

British diaspora from slum
     and galley, to colonies,
branching to Canada,
bringing hot tea
     to burning Australia,
manners and order
     to the confounded
          Buddhist and Hindu.

Africans to everywhere,
     retreading the steps
         of evil slavers,
drums and Orishas
     slipped under the nose
of colonizers. Black river
in brown and white sands,
    object of fear, desire.

Jews driven hither,
     Jews driven yon,
absorbing, withholding,
    and moving on,
a demon myth following
a people of peace.

Romana, the destested
     people, detesting back
the unwelcoming nations,
    dark eyes in wagons
         rolling by.

The Russians, fleeing
     Lenin, Stalin,
and later monsters,
weeping, eat blini
in foreign capitals.
Each, in his heart
returns from exile.

The gay diaspora,
men living abroad,
abhorred by their own
parents and fellows,
some paid, in fact,
to stay away, society’s
“remittance men.”

Other migrations
are underway. Millions
flee the weather, the floods,
the failed crops, the rising sea.
So great this flow shall be
that nations shall be erased
and new ones formed.

The thing about diasporas
is that the place of exile
becomes enriched,
in fact becomes a new thing
upon the earth, amalgam.
There, nothing belongs
    to anyone by birth.
A culture is a cubbyhole
in a large treasure-chest,
its contents free for all.

Just take a breath
in New York City:
the smell of bagels baking,
the fish scent of
    Canal Street open market,
the spicy aroma of curry,
the corner taco stand.

The babel of welcome tongues,
strange and delicious,
on a free street declaiming
the art that was not allowed
back home. 

Property of Zeus

by Brett Rutherford

     After Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 68

A fool said: “Spare the pretty ones,
for they are property of Zeus.”
Does he, the son of Kronos, require
more than his thousand-year
     Ganymede, than whom
no mortal youth can be
     more handsome?

I want Charidemus.
I told him so. Some fool
advised him to seek only Zeus
as his lover, the prize so high —
good food, and life eternal.
But the price, boy:
     a boyfriend as old
     as the mountains of Atlas.

How vain the lad becomes.
He goes about now,
     chlamys flapping,
exposing his attributes
    to the blue sky above.
He wears an eagle pendant,
   the little flirt.

Elsewhere I’d better turn
my attentions, the busybody
advises me. With all
my other troubles piled up,
     do I need cloudbursts
     and thunderbolts, too?

At risk, I follow him about.
Courting his little ascension
he might go off some cliff
or get his eyes pecked out
by lesser avians. Dare I,
if an eagle lifted him
     on giant pinions,
grab hold, pull back,
aghast and weeping,
hot tears on my empty hand
my only reward? I fear
I am not so brave as that.

Zeus, take him then! Let’s
get the waiting over with.
Glut your eyes on beauty.
And having taken one, oh,
Charidemus has brothers,
cousins, all of one mold.

Or, if the sophist is right,
you’d might as well scoop up
the whole town square’s
ephebes, young loiterers
of a Saturday afternoon
with nothing better to do
than bask bright-eyed
in the blue-white day?
Take all, greedy god,
till none are left
but the lame and homely.

Consider, King of Heaven,
how I am denied ambrosia,
     and a poet, no less.
Harvest the earth
    of all its beauties,
and no more poems will come!

You want hymns,
     encomiums, prayers
        and rituals?  Fine.
In return, let each of us
cherish and keep his own
    Charidemus!

 

An Interior Temple

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, xii, 57

Praxiteles of old
     made delicate art
     in bronze and marble,
fooled men to believe
     a lifeless copy
     moved and breathed
in the confines
     of a captured moment.

Today’s Praxiteles, an
     almost-beardless youth,
has other powers. His hands
reach into my heart
and carve a figure there:
dread Eros, the rogue-brat!

This young one even
makes things inside my head,
already so clogged
with mazes and Minotaurs:
the latest, a many-chambered
temple where he alone
merits my worship.

As faint as fly-buzz
I hear the tiny hammers,
the dragging of stones,
as my interior temple
grows apace. Shall I

be better for this
acropolis complex
within my cerebellum?
Within my mind’s eye’s
eye, I spy an interior peristyle.
Am I permitted to kneel inside,
an ageless, robed
hierophant, hands
extended to one
who touches me back?

For be not fooled.
Its arms go up and down.
It even speaks.
(Beneath the god,
machineries below
give life to stone
and breath to lips.)

So dreaming, I worship
Praxiteles, and Eros obey.
Waking, I pass him by,
all eyes, and he pretends
he does not know me.

Oh, do not build and abandon
sky-palaces! Steal not the soul
in which proud columns rise.
Embrace, Praxiteles,
     this tortured dreamer!

Eros, my heart,
Praxiteles, my mind,
Priapus, down below.
I am a trinity. Pray
that my arms and legs
drawn hither and thither
do not fly off!

 

 

Of the Same Name

Praxiteles' Eros - Roman Copy

by Brett Rutherford

     After Meleager, The Greek Anthology,  xii, 56

How dare anyone so fair
have such a name as
     Praxiteles?
Should not the name
have been forever retired
after the Athenian carved
from Parian marble the gods
themselves? He made an Eros,
of Aphrodite born, by hand
and eye the gods permitted to see
without the punishment
     of blindness. 

Now Eros torments us,
endows today’s Praxiteles,
an idling son of no one
in particular, a youth
   among us watched
as he grew perfect,
who now, at twenty,
despite his indolence
looks fit to scale Olympus. 

Or will this living
     statue proxy be,
dispensing love affairs with ease,
while god-born Eros attends
the needs of the distracted gods?

It might be a good arrangement.
When there is much tedium
in Heaven, the gods come down
to bother nymphs and shepherds,
to woo away our mistresses,
and abduct by night the lads we adore. 

When there is too much intercourse
with those above, the crops
grow unreliable. Mountains smoke.
The rival temples demand
expensive sacrifices.

And oh, the demigods
     the poor maidens bear
to the despair of mortal
     relatives! 

With two love-gods about,
one here, and one above,
Hera will be vanquished,
and old wives silenced.

From the son of Cronos down
to the lowest demigod,
all heads will turn;
all beds will be fair play.

And as above, so below,
each one in turn shall love
and be loved, till all
fall down exhausted,
and die of old age, smiling.

There will scarcely be time
for the begetting of children.

 

 

 

Spitting Image

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology,xii, 76, 78

If Eros, my full-grown
     Nemesis,
stood sans the bow,
     the quiver, the arrows,
one foot before the other,
     just so,

and if you traced
     arms, shoulders, neck,
     the full-mouthed, high-
     cheeked, god-nosed
visage, and all the rest —

omitting those wings,
    of course,

then made Zoilus,
the potter’s son, pose
until each line and curve
was captured, lay one
upon the other. The same!

Let Eros put on
     the garb of youth,
the chlamys so
     provocative of desire,
then don the cap,
     the petasus,
or, better yet,
the cap suspended
by neck-string
behind the neck
as boys are wont
on windy days
to wear them. 

Trace this, lay one
outline upon the other —
Eros — Zoilus — the same!

 

 

Christmas Eve

by Brett Rutherford

After the cemetery walk

I went to the edge of town,

passing the sign that said

"Welcome to . . ."

There was a tree

beneath which nothing

but new underwear

awaited, last-minute

buy from Woolworth's.

My Mother and

the Evil One

would reel home

from the Moose Club

past midnight.

By noon the fights

and screaming

would overwhelm

the Merry Christmases.

I waited.

For a car, for a lean

and hawklike stranger,

the one who, it was said,

would carry you off.

I vowed this year

not even to enter

the tobacco-smelling

room with the tinsel-

tottering tree. So far

I had avoided it.

All I wanted

for Christmas

was my picture

on cartons of milk

beneath the headline

MISSING CHILD.