by Brett Rutherford
From Callimachus, Aetia, 2.
A Muse in a dream
came to Hesiod, as sheep
also slumbered on Helicon.
The things she said
regarding Chaos, he
could not recall, her words
reduced to ellipses.
But then another said,
in tones that burned:
“The evil done to another,
fills your own heart with woe.”
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Rufinus, The Greek Anthology, v, 12
Let’s get it on, Prodike.
Here at the bath, whose water
is neither hot nor cold, and flesh
is the fire that burns, let’s crown
our heads with daring laurels,
and with a vintage undiluted
take in the grape as fast
as the poems pearl out
from our laughing mouths.
Large cups, large draughts,
no matter who is looking
or wants to join us, more,
and always more to come!
Oh, do not remind me
the days are growing shorter,
how night’s long shadows
foretell the reaping. No!
Short is the time allotted us.
I shall be old, and you
a horror to look upon.
Shall we both live to see this,
and bitter at the last,
raise up our cups to Hades?
by Brett Rutherford
After Anonymous, from The Greek Anthology, v, 2
The whole town is on fire
over one wanton woman.
Purses are empty; the wives’
rainy-day treasuries
plundered; the son’s
patrimony in mortgage
to fill the greedy coffers
of one female. Sthenelais,
she calls herself. The rose
she fancies she smells like
is gilded with young men’s
ruin. I pass the arbor
where red and white blooms
entwine with fatal thorns
among them, and what
my nostrils detect
is not the attar of rose
but just a faint whiff
of well-oiled rutting.
Smiling, I pass her door,
and am not tempted.
All I require
is one long glance at her,
taking her in
from top to bottom, side
to side, curved just so,
and in my artist’s eye, all
has been captured there.
All I require
is my own firm bed,
and an all-too-familiar
vintage, and one dogless,
catless and riotless night,
and there she comes.
No need to attend
those silly conventions
of disrobing. Nude
she prefers to walk
in moonlight, the shortest way
from her lust-lubricated
chamber to my straw bed.
For every stroke
the town boys gave her,
she proffers ten my way,
my mattress afloat
among the jealous
constellations. She stays
till dawn. She laughs at me
and tells me not to pout
at my lack of fortune.
I have drawn her figure in air
and she rushes in to fill it.
No matter who calls, she tells me,
no matter how high or handsome
the face at her door, the moment
her lover nods off, she’ll scurry away
to our most secret marriage bed.
And who am I to merit such
attention from a famous beauty?
No one at all, really.
I have no wealth. No place is named
for any ancestor I care to name.
Lords of the town: I sweep your streets.
Scant are the coins you afford me.
Do I not see the comings and goings
at doors and garden-gates at dusk,
how many times and for how many
different men one door goes suddenly
ajar? Yet when I shed my thread-bare coat
and hang my torn hat behind the door,
I need but close my eyes. I am Paris,
and that most-coveted Sthenelais,
oh, Helen, if ever a woman were!
At the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve
by Brett Rutherford
From a cloud as thick as cotton
the egg-shaped face emerged.
It was not smooth, not white
but brown and when it spoke,
the wrinkles of millennia spread out
around its watchful, sparkling eyes.
Not once before did such a one
appear to me. The way was open.
No spirit guide preceded me,
and other than the riddle of my life
no puzzle was put before me,
and no monsters blocked the way.
“Poet,” he said, “do you know me?”
“I think I do. We have not met
but the word ‘ancestor’ comes to mind,
and through my father’s mother’s
mother we are of one blood.”
The egg-head nodded. “That will do.
I had a name, but I myself
have forgotten it. I am glad
you are not afraid of me,
for those who bow and scrape
and mistake me for a god
are of no use to me — fools!”
“I do not mistake entities,
old and distinguished, for gods,”
I assured him. There was no fear.
A stone seat came up behind me.
I sat. Something like elbows
leaned forward from out the fog.
Soon we were eye-to-eye.
A bony hand, its fingers knobbed
with uncounted age, emerged
and held forth a giant femur bone,
remnant of some mastodon.
From end to end it was carved
with notches, some lines, some lines
with hooked curved above them.
“This is the count,” he told me.
"Notches on bone, and then behind me,
marks on stone, tens to hundreds,
hundreds to thousands,
one record passed along
and across this continent.
"We came from world’s roof,
from the fertile valleys,
the bamboo forests.
Nothing was ever enough.
Always, we moved onward.
Always, the beasts were chasing us.
“We slept in dank caves,
skin-covered huts, houses
of bark and wood.
Some places offered plenty,
other dank contagion
we learned to avoid.
"Evil there was:
the bite, the sting
of snake and scorpion;
the sudden storm,
the whirlwind, the quake
that leveled houses.
“We guessed that here no king
dared raise a palace,
how mounds and pyramids
alone endured
when the floods came
and sinkholes swallowed.
It was an angry place
that did not want us
to walk upon it, it seemed.
“Wild beasts consumed us;
some we consumed in turn.
The dog, the goat, the lamb
we held to us; the wolf,
the bear, the lion we drove
from us with spear and fire.
“To whom did this land belong?
the sly thief
with the mask around his eyes?
the chattering squirrel?
the migrant birds in the open sky?
“Thousands of lakes,
and hundreds of rivers
with their tributaries
waited to welcome us.
No one was there. We saw
no other people until,
some ages later, our own
lost cousins came round
to find us again.”
“Ancestor,” I answered.
“We have guessed as much
from bones and shards
and bits of pottery. The woe
is that you left no poetry.”
He sighed. He waved
the giant bone again.
“The count,” he said.
“This is all I have to tell you.”
“But I cannot read this.”
His hand took mine and made
it trace the notches, one by one.
“The count,” he repeated.
“The count of what?”
“How many times the winter has come,
and the summer after it,
and the winter again,
since our first foot fell
on this vast and unpeopled land.
Our count, our claim,
our history.”
“But I cannot read this!” Against
my will my fingers ran
from end to end of the long fossil,
turning and touching another row,
another, and another.”
“The count!” he shouted at me,
his eyes imploring now. Faster
my fingers traced the carven lines,
faster and faster still, until —
It is a summer dawn. Upright I sit
in my modern bed. The birds
are about their business, the first
morning bus is at the corner,
announcing its destination.
I speak aloud the count of years
since the first man came
from far-off Asia
to make this empty land his own:
Forty-two thousand
seven hundred
and ten times
have winters given way
to summers since
the days of the Ancestors.
by Brett Rutherford
Theognis, high in honor
among the archaic Greeks
served Apollo, and thus
he pledged his patron:
“Lord, child of Leto, son
of the lightning-bearing
Zeus of Olympus, I kneel
at your feet and beg
the company of Muses.”
So, too, Theognis
loved every lad whose face
bore any semblance
to Apollo,
abjectly, in the face of scorn.
“First breath, last breath,
and every breath between,
I consecrate to you,” [1]
he swore to the god,
an adoration worth
a thousand poems at least.
But as for me,
I serve a fickle deity:
fleet Hermes who comes
and goes as he pleases,
the one who seldom arrives
by daylight,
but rather in dreams,
in ever-deceptive
masks and guises.
Apollo may bless the poets
who labor patiently
at measured epics. I wait,
instead for Hermes,
the avatar of sudden inspiration.
And, just as Theognis pined
for noble youths
more bent on games and girls,
I spent my youth
on fair-haired orphans,
outcasts and dreamers,
my fellow exiles and reprobates.
Not one of them had a home
to go to; most
had been written out of wills,
turned out-of-doors
to their own devices.
Oft times I sleep
with window open,
so that the god
who makes house-calls
between his errands
may leave me the blossom,
root, or branch
for my next poem,
so too the strays,
scruffy and poorly shod,
may enter at random
when least expected,
in need of caresses.
And thus, through gods
and the shards of gods
on beautiful faces,
the night holds out
against the burning day.
NOTE:
1. The Theognis quotes are paraphrased from his Elegaic Poems, I, 1-4.
