Birth of a Poem

 by Brett Rutherford

     From a fragment of Callimachus, Aetia 7

There must be someone,
some Eileithyia, midwife
or fairy of the birthing hour
that oversees new poems
kindly, and sends them forth.
Just as in Paros they honor her,
an idol dressed in gilt-edged
robes and daily blessed —

may such a one come to me,
     Ellate nun, elegoisi
         d’enipseisasthe liposas
          cheiras emois
wiping her two anointed hands
not on my head, but on my elegies,
     ina moi poulu
          mensois ’itos,
that they may go on forever,
beyond my span of years,
to live beyond fire,
     and forgetting,
to leap the wormholes
     of tattered papyrus
and come back whole again.

A poem, once begun:
can it ever be finished?

 

Hesiod's Deam

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.”

Make Merry Now

 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 Night, She Is Mine

 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!