The Pick-Up Man

by Brett Rutherford

 

The bum slid in to the midnight diner’s

most spacious booth. He needed the room

for his rope-tied suitcase, the fat tuba,

the trombone tied ‘round his waist,

the trumpet dangling from bright red belt.

 

“I shouldn’t serve you,” the waitress admonished.

(She needed a break to go

and chain-smoke in the alley).

“What with the epidemic and all,

and you with no mask at all, and dirty.

You look like Death warmed over.”

She sighed. “So whaddyaywant?”

 

The gaunt man asked for bacon and coffee,

and a couple of eggs, oh, any which way.

“You got the money to pay me, right?”

He waved a wad of ten-dollar bills; she thought

she saw a hundred in there among them.

“Okay, okay, just asking. We get all kinds in here.”

 

“I am an honest man,” he assured her.

“And I want to eat with metal utensils,

not that crummy plastic stuff.”

“Where did you find those instruments?”

She made small talk while she wrote his order,

imagining a band-camp bus wreck

he might have scavenged from.

“You’re off to pawn them, I suppose.”

 “Pawn them? Young lady, I play them.”

Up went his head and chin, his shoulders proud.

 

“The tuba, the trumpet, the trombone, too.

I am a pick-up man, famous on three continents.

I never miss a note. My specialty is Requiems.

Offstage only, on account of my appearance.

 

“I am the Flying Dutchman of brass players.

When the composer’s score say “Brass band,

offstage,” that’s me in the lead, back-stage,

or in some balcony or apse or belfry, even.

Sure, they scoot a couple of the orchestra

to join me, but I am the voice of voices.

 

“Nobody wants a walking skeleton like me

on stage with the dainty-lady harps and fiddles.

I get the call for the Verdi Requiem, the Berlioz

(I’ll even do the Messiah trumpet so long

as I stay in the back and away from the lights).

Best of the best, conductors know me.

My Tuba mirum when all hell breaks loose

in those requiems is legendary.

Uncredited I am, but that’s me piercing through

in the records of Toscanini, and Reiner,

the golden age of concerts and records.

 

“Yes, I am a pick-up man.

Offstage only, top dollar.

They know I’ll scare the be-Jesus

out of anyone the way I play.

 “Apocalypse coming,” they say, and shudder.

I take my money, mind my own business

until the next gig comes around.

When famous people die, they play

more Requiems than usual. Hell, I could have

retired on Kennedy alone.”

 

He eats in silence. The radio had died

the moment he had entered. They stand around,

adjusting the dial and the antenna. No matter:

it would start up again the moment he left.

It’s just a side effect that trails along

when the Last Trumpeter comes to dine.

Tomorrow he’d play with the Boston Symphony,

then off to New York, then a long bus to Seattle,

this way and that, city to city, year after year, until —

 

Until it would be just him alone. He’d play

the Tuba Mirum and no one would answer,

in a vast expanse of ruined cities, a world

empty and hammered flat by bombs.

He would play and play until his lips bled,

until with his last breath a requiem for one

and all, a requiem for one and all,

a requiem for one.

 

I, the Higgs Boson

Photo: CERN

 

by Brett Rutherford

Although I am nothing, really,
ten thousand aspiring
physicists have published papers
claiming some intimate knowledge
of my attributes.

If some of these papers
are pasted together
from other papers,
and my name dropped in
at random to secure fame
and instant promotion,
do not be surprised.
I join the ranks of ether,
orgone, and phlogiston.

My name is dropped
with finality, to explain
anything whatever
at a cocktail party.
String Theory?
How “yesterday!”

No matter how
you squint, or turn
the pages of formulas
that claim to prove me,
I am not there at all.

I soon expect
to become an ingredient
in food supplements,
and fill black stones
in costume jewelry.
Homeopathic labels
will list me as key
to infinite dilution.

Massless,
weightless,
colorless,
spinless,
of no particular
political party,
uninterested
in evolution or progress,
I am nonetheless
on everyone’s lips.

I may be the God particle,
but I do not attend Mass.

Without an altar
on any planet,
I am more famous
than Jesus
or the Beatles, already.

Get with it, morons!
On your knees, fools!
The Boson cometh!

 

Mourning Upon Mourning

by Brett Rutherford

Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “March 1871”

Back-to-back. Mourning after mourning.
     Ah! the ordeal redoubles.
So it goes. This pensive man can bear it;
this pensive man appears untroubled.
Certainly, it is good that some are made this way.
When robust pains attack savants,
soldiers and hardened fighters,
tribunes, or apostles,
who have devoted their lives to righteous things,
they remain standing no matter what.
You have seen it, Guernsey,[1] you have seen it, Caprera.[2]
Once a consciousness is fixed,
     then nothing will falter there.
For, whatever the wind that blows on their flame,
deep principles do not tremble in the soul,
for it is in the infinite that their calm fire shines.
For the sinister hurricane, fierce by night
can shake its shadows and dark webs up there,
without once causing the stars
to move or stray in their fixed folds.

---

[1] Guernsey. Island in the English Channel where Hugo spent most of his two decades’ exile.

[2] Caprera. Island where Giuseppe Garibaldi, leader of Italian unification, settled for the last decades of his life. He volunteered to help France in its war against Prussia.

The Drum-beat and the Lowered Flag: The Funeral of Charles Hugo

 

by Brett Rutherford

Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “March 1871.”

From the fields, the animal roar of drum-beats.
Windless, the flags hang limp at half-mast.
From the Bastille we march to the foot
of the dreary hill where the ages past sleep
next to the living century beneath the cypresses.
The mute wind moves no branches.
The people have weapons on their arms;
they are in respite from their own struggles.
The people are sad; somber they stand, and full of thought/
Silently, their large battalions form a hedge around the grave.

The dead son is there,
and the father longing for the tomb is there,
one yesterday still valiant, robust and handsome,
the hiding the tears on his face, is old;
and each legion greets them as they pass.

O people! O majesty of sweetness immense!
Paris, city of sunlight, you whom the invader
assailed and was unable to conquer,
and whom he has incarnadined with blood,
you whom one day we will see, amid a royal orgy,
emerge, with lightning on your forehead,
like the Commendatore,[1] O city, you have this height
of grandeur to pay mind to the pain of one man.

To find a soul in Sparta
     and to see a heart in Rome,
     nothing is more admirable;
and Paris has tamed the universe
by the force through which we feel goodness.
These people are heroes; these people are righteous.
They do much more than conquer: they love.
O august city, that day everything trembled,
when the revolutions rumbled, and in their mist,
through the rays, you saw re-open before you
that terrible shadow which sometimes opens wide
before great peoples; and the man who followed
his son’s coffin paused to admire you,
you who, ready for all proud challenges,
unfortunate, made humanity prosperous.
Dark, he felt like a son at the same time as a father,
a father when thinking of him,
     a son when thinking of this city.

May this illustrious young fighter full of faith,
gone into the deep place that calls for us all,
O people, keep your great soul forever close to him!
You gave it to him, people, in this supreme farewell.
That up in the superb freedom of the blue sky,
he witnesses, holding on high an unseen weapon,
the struggles of duty, and carries them on.
Law is not law only here below;
the dead are living people still fraught in our battles,
sometimes having good, sometimes evil as their targets;
sometimes we feel their invisible arrows passing by.
We believe them to be absent. No, they are present;
we get past the earth, the days, the tears,
but there is no getting past fate.
The tomb is our sublime extension.
We wake up there surprised
     to have thought we ever fell.
As into the deeper azure the swallow migrates,
we enter happier into an even greater duty.
We see the useful with the right parallel;
and on our own wings we are carried out of the shadow.
O my blessed son, serve France,
from the middle of this abyss of love that we call God.
It is not to sleep that we die,
no, it is to do from above
what our humble sphere does below;
only to do it better, only to do it well.
We only have the goal, heaven has the means.
Death is a passage where everything changes to grow;
who was an athlete on earth
is in the abyss an archangel;
on earth we are limited, on earth we are banished;
but up there we grow without hindering the infinite.
the soul can display its sudden scope there;
it is by losing your body that you regain your form.
Go then, my son! go then, spirit! become a torch.
Shine! Glide into the immense tomb!
Serve France. For God places in it a mystery,
for you now know what the earth does not know,
for the truth shines where eternity shines,
for as we see only night, it is light
that leads you forth.

—Paris, March 18.

---

[1] Royal orgy … Commendatore. I take this to be a reference to the last act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in which the corrupt Don Giovanni, amid a wild dinner party, is interrupted by the arrival of the ghost of the Commander whom he had murdered. The earth opens up, and Don Giovanni is dragged into Hell by his ghost-visitor.

Two Poems of Kabir

 The 15th century poet Kabir writes:

I laugh when I hear that the fish in

the water is thirsty :

You do not see that the Real is in

your home, and you wander from

forest to forest listlessly !

Here is the truth ! Go where you

will, to Benares or to Mathura ;

if you do not find your soul, the

world is unreal to you.

 

And another poem:

 

The Yogi dyes his garments, instead

of dyeing his mind in the colors of love :

He sits within the temple of the Lord,

leaving Brahma to worship a stone.

He pierces holes in his ears, he has a

great beard and matted locks, he

looks like a goat :

He goes forth into the wilderness,

killing all his desires, and turns

himself into an eunuch :

He shaves his head and dyes his

garments ; he reads the Gita and

becomes a mighty talker.

Kabir says : " You are going to the doors

of death, bound hand and foot ! "

 

-- Translated by Rabindrath Tagore (1915)

Sleep Not On Your Back

 by Brett Rutherford

     Based on an Old Assyrian Hymn,
(Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judentum, ii, 413.)

Sleep not on your back, for Lilith comes,
and from your seed her progeny shall rise.
If warts and boils assail you, they are
the lip-prints of Lilith’s kisses, beware!

An evil demon has enveloped your bed.
An evil ghost prevents your rising.
A great devil has taken your breath
and made all your hairs to stand on end.

Bewail at morning the hag-demon’s clutch,
the breath of a ghoul still fresh in our mouth.
The robber-sprite makes dim your eyes
and no mortal human beauty ravishes you;
only the thought of dark pollution pleases you.
Your limbs are wracked by an evil goddess,
the Night-Phantom’s Handmaid
     has made you her groom.

And when you die, alone, unshriven,
the legion of your invisible children,
pale kindred of your nocturnal emissions
shall crowd about and call you ‘Father.’

 

Charles! Charles! O My Son!

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, March 1871.

Charles! Charles! O my son! O Death, what now?
My son has been taken from me.
All, flying away from me, everything,
     to make me know that nothing can last!
Into the great clarity obscure to us,
     you have vanished in an instant.
I, in my sunset, see Charles, my east, perish.
How we loved one another, father and son.
A man, alas, creates and dreams, and smilingly binds
     his soul to other souls. He tells himself
it shall be always thus, and goes about his way.
Commencing his own descent in years,
he lives, he suffers, the price of being,
and suddenly in the palm of his hand,
he holds nothing but ashes.

It seems but yesterday
     when an emperor proscribed me.
Two decades, hemmed in by the seas,
I stayed away, my spirit bruised.
Fate reaches down to each and all,
striking for reasons all his own.

God took away my homeland.
I have only one son,  one daughter left.
Here I am almost alone in this shadow
within which I walk forward.
God ekes my family away from me.

Oh! stay, you two who still remain with me!
our nests fall down, but your mother blesses you
out of dark death, and I, in bitter life, bless you.
Yes, in the manner of the martyr of Zion,
I will go on and complete my struggle,
and I will continue the harsh ascent
     which feels more like the fall.
Following the truth is enough for me,
seeing nothing but the great sublime goal.
I walk, in mourning, but proud.
Behind duty I march straight to the abyss.

 

The Struggle

 by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “March 1871”

All around me, alas, the anger of ignorance.
Hard as it is, we must pity those
beyond the reach of truth’s great radiance.
Besides, my friend, what does it matter.
     Honor is on our side.
Yes, let us pity those, who while insulting us
with jeers, hasten to soil themselves, and kneel
before the horrible peace that strangles France.
The brooms of your disdain, and mine, shall sweep
their idiotic ingratitude aside. History, when it
is written, shall only remember them as jots,
ellipses, initials undecipherable.
They would drive Jesus hither and yon
like a homeless gypsy; Saint Paul would seem to them
a hideous Democrat with dangerous ideals.
They would even say of Socrates,
     “What a terrible jester this one is.”

Their darkened, myopic eye is afraid of dawn.
Is it the people’s fault? No. In Naples, in Rome,
here, always, and everywhere,
it is quite easy for simple folk
to dart envious eyes at the soldiers
(because they suffered the honor of losing?),
or to mutter curses at mitered priests
(because their impotent prayers failed?)
and envy just as quickly transmutes to hate.
The icicles I watched this winter,
passing our river docks pell-mell,
throwing such a dark cold, but just as soon
they fled and melted quickly in the shadows.
The inhuman stabs of these icy blades
like human hate and vanity, here and gone.

I think of those who once, like divine fighters,
came alone to the gates of a city,
without an army to be its deliverance,
and of how the flood of vile clamors
     rolled over them unfelt.
What is the use of all this? Come, let us join hands.
And I, the old Frenchman, and you, the ancient Roman,
let us venture out together. There is no umbrella
against contumely, and we need not dress
for the occasion of our condemnation.

We shall find it a sad place;
we shall be made uncomfortable in what should have been
a place of wine and olive. We shall have recourse
to our high cliff, where, if we are murdered,
at least it is by the sea. There, let us seek
the august insult of the lightning,
the never-low fury and the great bitterness,
the one and true abyss, and let us leave
the slime of the mud for the spume of the sea.