Introduction to Barbara Holland's Medusa

Barbara A. Holland died in 1988. For most of the years between 1973 and her death, I was her principal book publisher (under the imprints of The Poet’s Press, Grim Reaper Books, and B. Rutherford Books). During the intervening years, I have kept most of her chapbooks and books available, some in print and some on-line. 
After 31 years in the keeping of the McAllister family in Philadelphia, the poet's notebooks and papers have been transferred to The Poet’s Press. The objective is to find an archive that will maintain the Barbara Holland Papers, whether in physical form, or in digital form. The present volume is the first product of this project, as we have begun to catalog and scan the papers. 
Approximately 200 printed magazines containing Holland’s poems from the 1970s-1980s have been scanned.  Some of these may be added to the Collected Poems edition published in 1980; others will form a separate, large Collected Poems, Volume 2.
Astonishingly, the trove of typed manuscripts contains five book-length poetry manuscripts which, although containing some familiar “warhorses,” are largely made up of poems no one has seen outside of their appearance in obscure magazines. An enormous folder of “Old Poems” spans from the late 1960s  up to as late as 1987.  If possible, I intend to see each of these manuscripts into a print and/or digital edition before the papers are archived. Holland published, by her own account, in more than 1,000 small press and literary journals, making her one of the nation’s most prolific published poets.

Medusa and Other Poems
The present book exists, so far as I know, in only the single copy found in the Holland papers. It is self-published, undated,  and bears the address of 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. By my guess and from internal evidence, the chapbook was printed sometime between 1958 and 1961. The copy at hand is personally inscribed by Holland to Leonie Adams, a famed poet who was her aunt, and whose help and encouragement she solicited. This copy has penciled markings not in Holland’s hand, and some typographic corrections by the poet. 
Barbara told me sometime in the mid-1970s that Leonie Adams had refused to help her in her poetry career, and it is no small wonder considering how shocking the content was, especially from a woman poet at the cusp of the 1960s, a daughter of two accomplished Philadelphia academics. Medusa has to be the most shocking first book of poems by any American female poet, erotic, Satanic, raw in Chthonic myth, and assured in its bardic manner.
There is some indication that Holland was persuaded to withdraw the chapbook. She never listed it in her publication credits and never offered any of the other poems for inclusion in my anthology, May Eve: A Festival of Supernatural Poetry in 1975, nor at any time after. Her notebooks offer evidence that she strove to write in other veins, but the supernatural affinity roared back by the early 1970s with Holland’s two most famous live-performance pieces, “Black Sabbat” and “Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.” 
Medusa includes 13 poems in its table of contents. Two more poems were added, apparently to fill out two blank pages at the end of the book, so the poems “Undermined” and “Fire Tumor” should be considered as outside the conceived cycle of poems centered around the title-poem.
Although this book might seem to belong to the horror genre, this was a minor niche in 1961 and rather limited to fiction (Barbara knew the work of writers such as Ray Bradbury and Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft quite well). Along with Holland, Shirley Powell, Claudia Dobkins, and, later, Jack Veasey, we formed the Gothic avant garde in Greenwich Village, cemented with the publication of May Eve in 1975. It is safe to say that we were regarded as lunatics. But at no time did we consider ourselves part of a sub-genre: we were fellow poets in the New York poetry scene of the time, contending against all the other styles and manners of the era. And it is important to note that none of us wrote rhymed verse.  The poems we wrote were intended for performance, and we read them all over the Northeast. Barbara was our exemplar, and her readings from memory were riveting. Those who only heard her in her last few years, after illness had affected her eyesight and memory, have no idea how powerful and incantory her performances were. She was called, rightfully, the Sybil of Greenwich Village.

Poems from Notebooks and Manuscripts
For the remainder of this book, I have turned to Holland’s hand-written notebooks, and to the large “Old Poems” typescript folder. Holland’s hand-written notes are mostly preliminary sketches for poems, often a dense block of lines, not yet broken up in any kind of meter or breath-phrasing. The same lines might appear on several successive pages, re-ordered but still with little hint of what might become a typed poem for submission to a magazine. A number of these were coherent and polished enough that I felt them worthy, especially as they demonstrate Holland’s attempt to take everyday journal ideas and make them into poems.
Thus, from these notebook sketches, I have “constructed” poems. Some needed only lineation and punctuation, and since I often worked with Barbara on the final appearance of her poems in print, I did what I always did. I know her style and her voice. I passed by sketches that seemed unyielding, and prepared others that seemed almost ready to be poems.  I have invented titles, and I have made small groupings of short lyric pieces that were found on adjacent sheets and which seem to go together.
I found a clump of poems written during off-season visits to Coney Island, so I put some of these into a group titled “Coney Island Suite.”
I have also done what any book editor would do, which is silently to correct spellings, to replace words where another word was clearly intended, and in a couple of places, indicated with square brackets, to insert a word that I would have persuaded Barbara to add.  I have added a few footnotes to help the general reader.
Holland was famed for a kind of trance-like, floating “run on sentence” manner in her readings, and I have judiciously added semicolons and other punctuations that serve to make her syntax clear. In “Medusa,” which I heard Holland recite from memory hundreds of times, there was always a syntactical knot in the middle which I have finally addressed.
From the typed manuscripts I have selected a range of poems that include the everyday, as well as re-appearances of the raw desires of the Medusa poems. Those who knew Holland as an eccentric but staid “spinster poet” may be startled at her emotional confessions. But what may come back to haunt the reader is that Holland is always one brave outsider, contending with solitude, desire, scorn, and genteel poverty, the soul of a Homeric poet in the guise of a shopping bag lady. And we may see also from these poems that “Medusa” is about becoming the dreaded monster no one may regard, simply by becoming old. Holland told an interviewer, “I am my own prison.”

The Inhuman Wave

by Brett Rutherford

Those not Frenchmen, who found themselves
in Paris during the Terror, or the Commune’s tumult,
have told of them, the unnumbered multitude,
for every jeune fille a femme terrible,
how they welled out of the slums and docksides
ten thousand strong with knives and hooks,
marched all the way to Versailles to rip
and shred the silk bedding of Marie Antoinette;
how with scarcely-human, distorted visages
they howled with joy as nuns and priests
were dragged to the chugging Guillotine;
how they bore the piked heads of nobles
from square to square while shriek-singing
enfants de la Patrie (enfants indeed
as the starving fishwives and worn-out
ladies of the after-hours avenged their rapes,
revenged miscarriages and hunger’s stillbirths,
shook fists in the names of starved-to-death
children, of menfolk vanished to dungeons).

Those horrified witnesses to ’93,
or to the doomed Commune of commons’ rage,
said they had never seen such creatures,
contorted rag-faces that scarce were seen
in daylight, demons even from Goya’s fever,
Maenads in ’71 who hurled incendiary bombs,
Medusas of the Communards reducing the Tuileries
to an ash-ground of burnt and crumbled ruins
(damn their palaces! to the flames, their documents!) —
and how in each time of revolt, indeed,
illiterate and with no scrap of paper on them,
many a hag could issue detailed death-lists
of accumulated resentment, this way, milord,
to the alley where you will be torn to bits.
Women whose work it was to skin and scale
the Seine boats’ harvest, who throttled hens,
gutted the hares and trimmed the venison —
how easily they came to blood and rending!

“Where did they all come from? One never saw
such faces! A physiognomy of anger, creatures
so hideous and filthy one could not think
they dwelt with fathers, lovers and children;
rather, they were demons of political rage,
as though every wronged, dead harridan
rose from her Black Death catacomb undead.”
Mères-grand, Citoyennes, Dames de la Mort!
Beware, kings and tyrants, the women of Paris!

Peeling the Onion (Poem Version)

The story in this poem was placed in my collection, An Expectation of Presences, as a short story. It was put there, in effect, to "mark the place" where a narrative poem would be. It has taken years to put all the pieces together, and to be able to present my grandmother's "confession."

i

Summer of my fifteenth year, grandmother
spoke of the grown-up things, her secrets.
A little I knew from her mother, half-deaf
Cristina Butler, coal-stove memories
of Alsatian parents fleeing Prussians,
a grandfather who had served Napoleon
as waterboy in one of his campaigns.
The Emperor loved his men of Alsace
those who “spoke German but sabred in French.”
Things hidden in cubbyholes came down, things
my grandparents would inherit and carry on:
something in tarnished silver whose purpose
we never understood, a never-read Bible
from the Philadelphia Lutherans, and wine,
Passover wine long turned to vinegar.
There once had been a barn, long since burned down,
and you could see how far the garden had gone
when there were still men to do the tending.

But these were passed-on secrets, dimly-known.
Today grandmother Florence told me of Butler,
her father Albert, who robbed the town bank,
got thirty dollars for his trouble, caught
within hours. She showed me his photograph,
a stout man in coat and tie, Masonic pin
proudly displayed.”Dear Florence,” the obverse
said in pencil script, “the photos we took
together did not come out. Good-bye from your Pa.”
“And I never saw him again,” she said.
“He went to jail. No one know where he went
when he got out. Too shamed to be seen here.
I was left alone with my mother Cristina.”

But what about Homer, then?” I asked. She frowned.
Homer, the old man who had lived with Cristina
up to his death when I was eleven.
Cigar-smoking recluse called “boarder” sometimes,
others said they were “secretly married.”
We were told to include “Grandma Butler
and Homer” right after Grandma and Pap-Pap
in “Now I lay me down to sleep,” that nightmare
prayer that threatened death by suffocation.

“Homer came later,” grandmother told me.
“Nobody liked him, but he kept things safe.
We had bad years, what with the war, and then
the worst of the Depression. Nobody
had to eat except what you grew yourself.”
She wiped her eyes; she was peeling onions.
Her wide peasant face, pock-marked and plain,
the face of every German village,
bent downward over her task, the skins and roots
of onions falling into the bucket
where all the waste and slops accumulate.

She held one up, pointed her knife at it.
“The truth is like this here onion.” she said.
I jumped to hear her use a simile.
I leaned forward. “What do you mean, grandma?”

“See here. I peeled it So here’s the white part.”
She cut some more. “Now look. There’s dirt again
and another layer of peel inside.
Then the rest is all white. That’s just the way
some people talk to you. A lie outside,
and then a little truth, and then more lies,
until you get to the white truth inside.
I guess you’ve seen enough — how people are?”

Like my stepfather, I thought. My mother, too.
The double scandal of small-town affairs.
My mother, my father’s sister’s husband,
together now in a new town, “in sin”
as everyone called in. I lived with her
and the man I once knew as “Uncle Joe.”
My father fled town when they spread the lie
that he had incest with his own sister,
gaslighting near-incest with false outrage:
they did it first, so it’s all right for us.

Grandmother’s house was just three miles from town.
That summer I tried to call my school-mates.
Their mothers answered the phone; each told me
their sons and daughters were just too busy,
and I shouldn’t bother to call them again.
The steeple-filled streets frowned on my walking.
The place that held my ancestral tombs shunned me.

In the new town, the hated town, I said
“My parents are separated.” I called
the humping couple Gertrude and Claudius.
Stepfather hated me, as I soon grew
to understand I was despised for what
I was and did, a sensitive book-worm,
hated the more for whom I resembled.
(During the courtship, if a slow dive bar
seduction can be called that, he told her
her son was a genius and ought to have
a trust fund to make sure he made his way
to some good college. A trust fund, by god!)

The false white peeled away, indeed, one day
when Uncle Joe, whiskey-drunk, said to me:
“Just so you know” — he never pronounced my name,
“You are not welcome here. Your father pays
child support. A bed, food on the table,
that’s what you get. But when you graduate
I want you out of here. Don’t ever expect
anything from us.” I later learned how
he had dumped his children from Marriage One
into an orphanage. He meant what he said.

“Grandma, I know about lies, and liars.”
(I had already told her everything).
“I’m here right now to get away from them.”

“Out home — this is where you can always go.”
She wiped the onion tears, the anger tears.
The peels slid into the ever-swelling bucket.

ii

The house had been great-grandmother Butler’s,
a four-room never-quite-finished structure,
a living-room door that never opened
since the back porch there had never been built.
It hung in air above root-cellar door.
The roof and the four walls were nothing more
than tar-paper nailed over two-by-fours.
From the road, “a shack.” For Grandma, growing
from childhood to marriage, it was “Out Home.”
Power it had, but no running water.
Bucket by bucket, it came from the spring,
or fell from the stormy sky into tubs,
rainfall for washing, bathing, and cooking.

I didn’t mind summering there, so long
as the cache of books to read held out, so
long as there were woods to run to and from,
and the fierce night sky’s Milky Way undimmed.

This morning, in the kitchen, something new:
an alarming object I had not seen
in the house or the shed or the cellar:
a shotgun (loaded?) next to the front door.

Almost on toe-tip I stood, alarmed. “What
is that?” — I pointed — “And why is it here?”

“It might for your Uncle Joe,” she answered.

I smiled at the thought. It must have belonged
to my now-dead grandfather. She saved it,
perhaps when all his things were sorted out,
the coal-miners’ gear and carpenter tools
no one knew what to do with. Did she know
how to use it? What was it really for?

She said no more, but the gun stayed. Not once
was I tempted to touch or inspect it.
Its aim was at the ceiling, yes, but what
if it toppled over and shot us both?
Each night I was aware of the dark steel,
the double-barrel, the trigger so tensed
that a sleepwalker might load and fire it.

One afternoon, late, we heard someone’s car
come up the long driveway, hump over the wood-
plank bridge, crack-hiss on the close-up gravel.
“Quick! Turn off the lights!” my grandma ordered.
“The TV, the radio, everything!”
She locked the door. We crouched on the carpet
beside the bed great-grandma had died in.
The shotgun lay on the quilted bedspread.
I smelled black powder and spied the brass edge
of the shotgun shells. The gun was loaded.

In the yard, I heard the chickens scatter.
A single set of heavy feet, up steps
and onto the porch. Two knocks at the door,
and then two raps on one kitchen window.

We waited. Grandma was shaking, from fear
or anger I could not be sure. She reached,
and when her hands found the shotgun she calmed.
She crouched. She was ready to aim and shoot.

At the kitchen door, an angry pounding.
“God damn it, Florence, I know you’re in there!”
a bass voice shouted. “I just want to talk!”

The voice … was the voice of my stepfather.

He pounded again, cursed. Glass did not break,
door frame did not abandon it hinges.
The steps receded. A neighbor’s dog barked.
Again the chickens scattered. Another
round of curses as the rooster attacked
and chased him back to his automobile.
The engine started clumsily, gears ground
as he made the turnaround and went back
to the blacktop slope of Ore Mine Hill Road.
We waited for the normal outside sounds
to come back again. Hens, robins, wind sighs
from the high pines that grazed the bedroom wall.

“What did he want?” I finally asked her. —
“He comes out here, days he’s supposed to work.
He’ll take me to the courthouse, he tells me.
He wants me to sign the property away
to him and your mother. He wants this house.
This is my home, your home, your mother’s home,
and home to my sons when they come visit.
When Joe comes in the daytime like this, drunk
or sober, he’s a bad man either way —
I just turn out the lights and I hide here.

“Drunk or insane?” I said to her. “He knows,
or ought to know, I’m here for the summer.
I guess there is no bottom to evil or stupid.”

From this point on, grandma and I became
a secret alliance. Amid the slither of serpents,
she was my only friend.

iii

This time she was peeling potatoes. Peels,
eyes, and dark spots fell into the bucket.
I no longer feared the shotgun. It stood
in its place next to the kitchen door.
She looked at me, at the gun, at the knife
as it deftly pared and sliced our dinner.
“Another story I’ll tell you. You’re old
enough to understand it now, or you will
when the time comes to sort all the stories out.

“I was just ten when my father went to prison.
My half-sister and I were mostly off to school.
Ma was alone all day, worked herself raw to cook
and garden. She learned to can. The winter was bad.
You had to get coal for the stove, no matter what.”
She pointed to the ancient coal stove, flues and pipes
set up to heat the place as well as cook and bake.

She hesitated then, and then it seemed she spoke
beyond me to someone, or in her mother’s voice:
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman here
in the country, alone in the woods. Husband gone
off somewhere, or maybe dead. So a bunch of men
are sitting around in a road-house, drinking beer.
They read the paper and they see a woman’s name
in the tiny print of an obituary,
or read out the address of a man sent to jail.
And, oh, they remember you. Men you hadn’t seen
since you were a little girl in school. It’s like they had
a list that they added to and subtracted from..

“One day a car comes down the drive. Two or three men
get out. And they take their hats off respectfully.
They have washed their hands and faces. You wouldn’t think
they had jobs they should be at, and on a weekday.
They bring you a big sack of groceries. They worked hard
to think of what you might be needing, salt to flour
to cans of soup to a jar of German pickles.
They come in and sit down. They have some of your bread,
crust like none they have ever known, so they tell you.

“Somewhere in that sack there is a whiskey bottle,
so someone says Let’s open it and have a drink!
And you want to be polite. You get the glasses.
They have a drink. You take a drink, though it’s a man’s
drink and you’re not accustomed to it. Then someone says
how lonely you must be without a man around.
And they laugh and make jokes until you blush.
And then they suggest something, and if you drank two
of those whiskeys and you got a little silly . . .”

She paused and looked at me. “...and you give in.” Nodding,
I waited for the rest. “And if you’re dumb enough
to do that, then there is no stopping it. They tell
their friends. They come by the carload to visit you.
That’s the other reason I keep the shotgun here.
Because of the things that can happen to women”.

iv

Grandma Florence has been dead for many years now.
Even the memory of great-grandmother Cristina grows faint.
Nothing remains of the house but its foundation.
Cousins passed by and took photographs.
They spoke to neighbors whose memories were long.
One knew all about the gang of three robbers,
how Albert Butler had gone away to prison.
They said Cristina Butler sold moonshine
right up to and past the end of Prohibition,
how cars came and went to the little “shack.”

“Yes, she sold her moonshine there,” the neighbor affirmed,
“but it wasn’t just moonshine she sold. She sold herself
and her little daughter Florence.”

The truth was in the onion, waiting.

Autumn Wizard, by Barbara A. Holland

AUTUMN WIZARD

by Barbara A. Holland

for Ray Bradbury 

When he fed your adolescence 
on the youth of his poems, 
do you remember 
his fireplace releasing 
his personal Octobers in sendings 
of unusual leaves: that they were crimson, 
indigo, coral and turquoise 
when they streamed 
out and once around him 
on their long glide to the ceiling? 

Do you remember that his house 
was a gaunt spinster with a rhomboid eye 
browed under angle of a gable; 
that the raw dawns of the crows 
had galled its clapboards? 

He was a poet then, 
as thin and angular as his house, 
and of a desperate season, 
when the sky screams and the clouds 
become impulsive. Not for all his summers 
has its bite diminished, even when the green-up 
hit him and his wallet swelled with May. 

He has been poet still. 
Despite the blockage of a moveable screen, 
the Autumn stuffs the yawning 
of the fireplace and the flue packs solid. 
The screen is a wall of gems, 
but even so, he sometimes 
removes it and the room is brawl 
of burst October when the crush 
crumbles and the whole belch of it charges 
the dining-room door. Then he burrows 
through the heap of his poems for air 
while his house leans on the wind.

This poem is featured in our new Poet's Press Ebook, Autumn Numbers.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER.

Talk at the Diner

by Brett Rutherford

Went to the City a few weeks ago —

all clean now since those homeless folks

took off and all found jobs somewhere.

Not a speck of garbage on the street.

The beggars were gone too. One drunk
I’d always see not far from the door

of some bar or liquor store, a nod and

a wink when he’d say, “Some money

for food, for Jesus’ sake.” You knew

just where your quarter wound up.

Well, he’s gone, and all the others,

the ones who pretended crazy or played

a scritch-scatchy violin for dollars.

Right here in town, by the tracks,

there used to be some Black folks,

but they up and moved last year.

Some factory must’ve given them jobs.

That Mrs. Hernandez who run the store,

the dirty one that no one would go in,

her place is all boarded up now.

They took her at night, seeing how

she had no right to be in America.

Remember those two men

who lived together, and how we’d talk,

tryin’ to guess what they did at night?

They up and moved; so did those gals

we thought were kind of funny

with their short hair and all those dogs.

Used to see that bus go back and forth

talking folks in wheelchairs out

and back from the shopping mall.

Since budget cuts it doesn’t run.

I wonder where those cripples went.

It takes all kinds, I say. We had ours:
that old man with the messed-up lawn

full of peace signs. That atheist poet
who’d cuss it out with the preacher

right here in the diner, and won to rights

more than half the time. Haven’t seen any

of those oddballs in the long while,

but the church is getting a new steeple.

Downtown was rough at night,

least in the old days, hell, just

last year it was still bad. Bikers came,

and bad women, and men you knew

from their complexion would slit

your throat in an alley if they could.

No one in the downtown taverns now

but farmers and red-cap hunters.

A woman can walk and not worry.

Sure I see lights, and hear sirens,

so late at night I don’t get up
to go out and see what it is.

They’re going to bulldoze a lot

of those yellow-taped houses.

Young people will move in, I’m sure.

Nice people.

Funny how all those other folks

keep moving away.

Not that I mind.

The Poet Named Richard Lyman

The Poet's Press is publishing a new edition of one of the earliest productions of our press, the 1971 chapbook, In the Silence of Scorpions, by Richard Lyman. Concerning the author, whom I have elsewhere described as the most forlorn and bedraggled poet in New York, I am only able to say this:

RICHARD LYMAN (1925- 2003) was the pseudonym of Richard Bush-Brown. He was active in the Greenwich Village poetry scene in the 1960s and early 1970s. 
The poet was the son of Harold Bush-Brown (1888-1983), a Harvard-trained architect and author of the 1976 book, Beaux Arts to Bauhaus and Beyond: An Architect’s Perspective (1976). His mother, Marjorie Conant Bush-Brown (1885-1978), was an artist and portrait painter, and both his paternal grandparents were artists. He was estranged from his parents, who disapproved of his youthful avowal of Communism. Only the fact of his birth is stated on web pages about his parents.
Bush-Brown attended Black Mountain College. His poetry is overshadowed by his reverence for Dylan Thomas. His poem, “The leopard came into the world” was his most memorable work, and his readings of it impressed listeners at New York poetry readings. On the strength of this poem, The Poet’s Press persuaded Bush-Brown to assemble the manuscript for this book.
No other details are known about the poet, who vanished from the Manhattan poetry scene, and so far as we know, he published no other books. 
He continued to live in Manhattan, was seen riding the subway to and from some Wall Street job, and died on October 18, 2003. 

Here is his best poem, a dark urban vision:

The leopard came into the world 
Came at half past one and left at midnight 
Lost in the eleven-hour city 
Picked up sticks at the railroad yards 
Swished his tail in the silence of lonely rooms 
Licked the kitten against the wrinkled wall 
Finding no break for the season’s evening ripening 
Into the trough of bludgeoned seas 
Finding in the waking dark the sun 
The leopard diamond-eyed at midnight 
Found his lost remorse between the open-eyed sea 
And the rails and trolleys of the dull freight-yard 
Among the pulleys of paradise he spied 
Among beggars and the screaming police 
The whisper and the whistler of the city’s bloom 
And then in the dark he expired like a bulb 
His flesh burned out against the dying wall of slums. 

This book will be published in PDF only, and will be the 243rd production of The Poet's Press.

The Poet Who Starved (Revised)

     by Brett Rutherford, after the German of Uhland

Such was his lot — each dismal day

was short, and was marked with sorrow;

just as a poet ought, he withered

and quite forgotten, passed away.

He was an ill-starred infant

with only a muse hag for a nurse-maid,

and she it was who tutored him

to sing whether supper came or did not.

His mother, if one called some woman that,

crisped early to her untitled urn,

and so presaged his latter doom,

an anonymous and unread vessel

unfit for holding in or keeping gold.

When all around passed pewter mugs,

flagons and cups and champagne flutes,

he was the one they scorned to cheer,

pouring the dregs on cindered ground.

He knew the names of their fine vintages,

the lineage of kings who trod the valleys;

he could tell the rise and fall of empires,

but not one sip was given him!

Still, smiles returned to him each Spring,

his dreams of sweet blossoms woven,

but others hewed his trees to splinters,

boots muddying his purple stream.

When others orgied holidays, game days

and feasts, and marched in victory parades,

he raised his proud cup from afar —

his, the clear cold water; theirs, bloating beers.

The others watched him as he walked on by,

between his study and the library shelves,

thought him a pale being of scarcely flesh.

“He must have inherited money.

“An other-worldly man, almost a ghost.

He doesn't live like us. Ambrosia, mead,

strange fruits and berries, and a millet stew,

must be his monkish provender.”

Dead! dead! they found him sitting there

over the crumbs of one last saltine, pot

of a weak tea too many times infused

until it was merely shaded water.

There was nothing in his house! Just papers piled!

Cupboards zig-zaggedy with spiderwebs,

ice-box unplugged, a gasless stove,

plates in the sink, oh, too far gone for mould!

Easy it was to carry him, pine box

weighing no more than pine box and a suit

of grave-clothes. No hearse for him: a handcart

sufficed to trundle him off to the graveyard.

His tread had scarcely marked the dust

when he walked of nights. May the earth

rest light on his shoulders. May someone find

those papers he left, and publish them.

May someone remember those words were his.

[Written February 2019, revised May 2019].

The Doll Without A Face (Revised)

 

by Brett Rutherford


Who is it who can tell me who I am? — King Lear


One tea-and-cookies Sunday, she had more time
to spend with me, the youngest son’s first child.
As I sat, lap full of Classic Comics,
grandmother Rutherford rummaged away
in the unseen kitchen. “Where? Where?” she asked.
Wood drawers slid. Cabinets squeaked open.
“Ah! Don’t slip away — I found it again.”

She cleared the tea table. “More, please!” I asked,
and held the tea cup out. She poured, I poised
the full teacup and watched the pot vanish
onto a sideboard. Then she placed before me
a bag, soft, suede, as tan as the oak leaves
that still clung rabidly to trees outside.

It was tied with a leather cord, cram-full
of objects that tumbled out. Small things first:
shiny white shells, water-worn bright agates,
black arrowheads, a bronze scrap verdigris’d,
a miscellany of seeds and pods, dried
leaves and petals long past the hint of hue.

“It’s like my rock collection!” I offered.
“Agates like that I get from Jacob’s Creek.”
She pushes that one aside, holds the black
arrowhead in the palm of her hand, “Sharp-
edged black glass, so good for arrows,” she said.
“That’s how my mother explained it.” She traced
the edge along her cheek. I shuddered then,
“Be careful! Obsidian! Volcanic
glass. I find it in the road-fill. Aztecs
used it to cut out hearts. Sharp as a saw,
a surgeon’s saw.” — “You know too much for ten.
Your teachers don’t understand you, I hear.
That’s why I can say things no one should know
’til they are old, and writing, far away.”

She reached into the bag, removed a doll,
an almost weightless thing of dried-out corn-husks.
It had a dress, blue-printed calico,
delicate red shoes, a beaded hat, braids
made of twisted corn-silk, blond white. Round head
was pulled tight with cloth, but hard as a stone —
no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth, no name
one could call it, or any name one wished.

“Boy: these are the things my mother left me.”
She left a long pause for that to sink in.
“Things that my mother’s mother left to her.
The family called themselves the Whites. Took her
in, a young girl, Indian braids and all.
No one was who they said they were: Stouffel
White was Christoph Weiss in Germany.
Henry White, the son whose big farm it was,
he spoke English, German when he had to.
Lots of children, hands to work and pray with,
one more was easy to take in. A lot
of Mingos from here were going West,
Senecas too, driven from New York state.
Many who could pass, already had names
from husbands and fathers and from Bibles,
and settled out in the hills and hollows.
Some had their children taken out to school,
some women married whites who didn’t want
an Indian man’s children, so gave them up.”


She went to the sideboard, a drawer pulled,
“Here” — a stern old woman in widow’s black —
“is how she looked when she came back to us.
I never called her anything but ‘Ma”;
she was ‘Mrs. Trader’ to the neighbors.
Ten years they had lived in Allegheny,
across the river from Pittsburgh, chairman
of some company board he was — died there
and she came on home. None of us did church
except for Christmas, and neither did she.


“You didn’t talk about being a Mingo.
It was bad enough when the first war came
to say the good White name was really Weiss.
But then she just told everyone: not White,
not Weiss, she was Indian, plain and true.
We laughed. She tried to change her clothing then,
bought beads and buttons and Indian scarves.
My husband was furious. Our children
were called names and ridiculed, but then
a thing of shame became a thing of pride.
One day she sat on the front porch with me.
She had this brown bag and the things in it.

“Sharp-edged black glass — this is good for arrows,”
she told me, as one by one she brought out
the rocks, the shells, the copper shard, this flint
she said came all the way from Michigan.
This from our fathers’ fathers, a bone thing
from a raccoon’s private parts, and magic.
She had a name for each thing, and a place,
all in her mish-mash Mingo-Delaware.

“Then came this doll, this doll without a face.
I never saw her cry but once, and this
was it. She didn’t let me pick it up,
just held it on her lap and said, “Listen.
Remember. My mother gave me this doll
the day she left me at the White farmhouse.
She’d be gone a while, she said, and I
must look at her face, then at the doll’s face,
then at her face and at the doll’s again,
till when I saw its emptiness I saw
her grieved face, her deep black eyes, her forced smile.
‘Just keep the doll with you till I return.’

The Whites were kind, and I worked hard.
Kept to myself and sang my own music.
When done with chores, and there were plenty,
I roamed in woods with the named animals
I knew from my mother’s teachings. Three girls
I played with, not quite as sisters. They scorned
my poor clothing, my stubborn braids. Ma White
took all my clothes one night and gave me a hand-
me-down dress and underclothes and new shoes.

I was less an outcast now. No Sunday
church for me, but we would play with our dolls.
Their dolls had porcelain faces, with bright eyes
and noses and ruby lips and blushes.
My doll — it had only my mother’s face
that only I could see, and I just smiled
as happy with my little one, as they
with theirs. Summers I’d play apart, out past
the last corn-rows where the deep woods began.
Mrs.White called me in, but I wouldn’t come.
I waited — one day each summer — she’d come.
A whippoorwill call in daytime, she’d come —
there’d be no embrace so wondrous, no eyes
so deep and dark and arrowed with sad tears,
nothing I wouldn’t labor through so long
as she came with basket and moccasins,
dried fruit and candied ginger, a handful
of found rocks and feathers and those agates
that looked like sunset paintings done on stone.

Up and down and across three states she went.
The old trails ran north-south and west-to-east:
Salt Lick Path to Braddock’s Camp; Braddock’s Road
white-written over Nemacolin’s Path.
She knew her way, scavenged and traded,
did God-knows-what to visit me each June.
Strawberry-time, I knew she’d be there
calling at the wood’s edge for her daughter.

Three years it went that way. I grew. Sisters
and cousins of the Whites tormented me
for my strange ways, weird songs, and for the doll
that had no face. At night they’d turn it round
so that it wouldn’t face the other dolls.
They said it gave their dolls bad dreams. I hid
it beneath my pillow, then in a box
where I feared it would suffocate. Ma White —

I could call her ‘Ma’ as long as the ‘White’
was attached to it like an apology —
came back from town one day with a present.
A doll it was, a newer, cleaner, bright
of eye, five-fingered, five-toed, black-haired and
silver-shoed princess. She’d put to shame the dolls
my sisters had nearly wrecked with playing.

Soon I prevailed at a porch tea-party,
where my doll, ‘Abigail’ now reigned supreme.
White sisters scowled, knowing no comeuppance
could come their way before the Christmas tree
restocked their dolls with the latest fashions.
My doll was lecturing her inferiors
on the new rules of the White doll order
when, from my corner of my eye, I saw,
between two cautiously-parted branches
what might, just might, have been my mother’s eyes.
I didn’t turn to look. Girl-chatter blocked
the call of the day-time whippoorwill, once.
Maybe twice I heard it, but didn’t go
to the wood’s edge where I always met her.
Then she was there, in full sight, eyes all wide
in a wordless ‘See me, daughter’ greeting.

And then. O my daughter, and then,
ashamed that my sisters might glimpse her,
sun-burnt and moccasin’d with her traders’
basket and pack — I turned back to my doll
and — I — pretended — not — to — see — her.”

“This is how my mother lost her mother.
She never saw her again. In this bag
she hid away the doll, the arrowheads,
stones, feathers, dried blossoms and raccoon bones.
No longer could she see her mother’s face
on the wrapped rock that was the corn-doll’s head.

“She hid who she was, until the time of remembering.”


[Revised May 2019]

Anniversarius 44: At the Edge of the Lake

I saw the lake, my lake, again, a few weeks ago [October 2018]. This brought me revisit this early poem, "October 1967" from The Pumpkined Heart. We all thought the world was coming to an end soon. The Vietnam War divided the country. People were threatening "hippies" with violence. In this "nature poem," written amid the violence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, about the remembered lake and the carillon music from the bell tower, I felt the isolation and anxiety.

Edinboro State College's carillon bells (real or a recorded) could be heard from afar. I remember going to class hearing "Musetta's Waltz," and coming out of class in the dark hearing Anton Rubinstein haunting melody, "Kammenoi Ostrow." The memory of the Rubinstein music against a fall-winter horizon bleak enough to be Russian, stayed with me.

Now I have rewritten this and added some current allusions, so that it is of 2018, although 95% of the poem is my 20-year-old voice speaking with the trees. This poem had been excluded from my Anniversarius autumn cycle, but this revision is now counted as part of that grouping. [Revised and expanded again, May 2019.]


ANNIVERSARIUS 44: AT THE LAKE'S EDGE

by Brett Rutherford

Scorched by the blind frost, the maple leaves die,
and men who love not autumn herd them up,
with rake and barrel and ignominious shroud
of plastic trash bag. They are trucked to a fenced-in
municipal recycling center, a death camp, really,
bull-dozed and stripped of all identity,
chopped to mulch for next year’s gardens.

Bird flocks rise up in arrow-shaped vectors,
riding the west winds out to escape us.
Leaves fall; they flee.

                                 While all this leaf-holocaust,
this flee-to-south abandonment
by nations of bird flocks goes on all day,
while long night chill crisps every lone cornstalk
and the dried-out irises droop, dying,
why are you doing nothing about it?

Abandon your sheltered room, I charge you:
gaze through the tree-bared acres at the line
of dark and leaden pines, black silhouettes
bold in the slanting dusk. A warning take
from the wind’s disconsolate sigh; no hope
can they gain from the coming election.

Death weaves through the browning, rigid cat-tails.
Brittle they lean, seed-shorn and childless now
that the swamp has been drained; their realm will end
at a gravel barricade, a concrete wall
no seed can scale, nor root circumference.

The blasted oak tree wears its own dead leaves,
a bearded miser, while maple and birch
stand naked and appalled. Bulldozers wait,
silent steel mastodons at glacier’s edge.
(There are plans, and trees are not part of them.

You and I are not part of them. A third
of the poor insects are already gone.)

From an old brick tower the carillon bells
play Kommenoi Ostrow, a plaintive song.

I go to the graveyard’s shore of the lake.
I stand amid the blasted maples,

tree-fathers as old as any tombstone here.
A few yellow leaves I have rescued dance
around my feet in a sly dust-devil.

They will return with me to join

my curiosity cabinet

of well-preserved loves, and gelled high moments.

Autumn is not and never will be

an ending. Autumn piled up on itself

is a bottomless leaf-pile. Oh, plunge in!

Stand here still hearing the dying bell-tone,

as a wind that tasted tundra slaps

your face awake with icy needles.

Kammenoi Ostrow fades to silence.

Where does one make a stand for life?

There is nothing to the north of you,

and little cause to bird-flee southward.

This is the edge of the world.

This is where the first snow falls.

Subjects: Edinboro, Kammenoi Ostrow, autumn poems




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC8ah61cMNw