Niagara and Back, 1966

by Brett Rutherford

Four days off

for holiday,

instead of turkey

and stuffing, my friend

and I decided to hitch-hike

Walt Whitman’s open road.

To where? To nowhere

or anywhere! Let’s see

how far we can go.

Five miles short
of Erie a sailor,
on leave and adrift
on his own adventure,

picked us up.

Where to? he asked.
Where are you going?
we ask. Niagara Falls,

he said, and all the way

into Canada.

Wide-eyed, we said
in unison, Then we

are going to the Falls.

We all laughed.

He never talked
about his ship or where
it took him, whether
to Vietnam or some

safe coast patrol.

You didn’t ask

soldiers why or what
they might have seen

unless they wanted

to tell someone
and said so.

Arriving at the Falls

and its noisy grandeur

we thanked our driver
and parted ways. We made
our way along the banks

above the Falls,

defied the signs and scoured

the rocky river shore
for rocks. My friend
was a geology major
and knew what does
and doesn’t belong.
I found a hollowed-out
rock almost too much
to carry about. He said
it was an Indian wheat-stone.
Into my bag it went.

Oblivious to borders
and needing no papers
we crossed to Canada.
We sampled such food
as nearly indigent

students could afford,
then reveled in sunset
and the rainbow-lit

Falls, immense
and grander by far
from foreign vantage.

Taking a cue
from a “rooms for rent”
sign, we found a room,
a tiny attic garret

that cost as much
as what our two wallets
contained, sparing enough
for one tiny breakfast.

You’ll have to share
the one small bed,
the landlady said.

It’s the last room.
She winked at me.

In minutes we were in the dark
and under one tiny blanket.
My friend said,
If you touch me, I’ll kill you.

So much for Walt Whitman.

Next morning we found
the cheapest diner
and spent our last coins
on bacon and eggs.

Hearing our talk,

the man next to us turned.

It was the sailor again.

Things didn’t work out,
he said. I’m heading back.
Are you guys staying or …

The unsaid was said
in that moment’s pause.
Had he planned to desert
and changed his mind?
Were we across the border
to dodge the draft?

We’re going back, I said.

I’ll take you back, then,
he offered. I kind of need
the company, you know.

At the border he showed
his military ID.
We two were asked
where we were born
and where we had been
on the Canadian side.

We went right through.
The sailor moved something
from under his seat
into the glove compartment.
Not to worry, he said.

It’s not loaded.

It was a slow trip

southward. We stopped

at Buffalo. He bought
us a welcome lunch.

Then, long after dark
he left us along
a local road somewhere
north of Meadville.

Fourteen miles
to walk
in the November night!

The withered corn

leaned dead

into the frosty air.

Yellow lights beamed

from sheltered farms
across the stippled fields.

No cars came. Not one.

We heard no sound

save that of cows

stalking the brush

beside us,

they walked,

but kept their silence.
Not one of them
had ever gone astray.

At last, in despair,
we found a sheltered spot
behind a hay-pile
and curled up to rest.
My best friend
nestled behind me for warmth.

I gazed at the unsleeping stars.
You touch me, my friend said,

and I kill you.

Good night, I answered.

Fifty, a hundred,
miles away, the sailor
pulled over on a dark road.

He reached for the gun.
Things didn’t work out.

Note: the U.S. drafted 382,010 men into military service in 1966, the highest total during the Vietnam War

Imaginary Playmate

by Brett Rutherford

It was my secret place
away from bath-time and spanking,
away from Grandfather’s grizzled hugs,
from the cries of the baby brother,
away from heat and brambles,
blackberry barb and poison ivy —
a cool-air haven
where the acrid fumes
of coke-oven smoke
never intruded:
the “spring-house,”
a covered well, actually,
a cobwebbed shed
of cool-sweated pump and pipes.

Here I could sit
behind its plank door,
imagining another door,
flat on the concrete,
that opened downward
to a treasure cave,
a city of runaways,
a subterranean launch-pad
for moon rockets.

One day a man was there,
crouching inside
beneath a straw hat,
a shoulder pack,
more frightened of me,
it seemed, than I of him.

I sat beside him
on the cold stone lip
of the gurgling well.
His whispered words
were barely louder
than the distant coal trucks,
the chirring cicadas.
His name was Eric, 

a young man, yet
bigger than my father.
He asked about my mother,
my teacher, the friends
I would see again
in second grade in the fall.
“Too bad your mother is married,”
he said. “She’s pretty.
I watched her from the road.”

Two weeks he hid there,
sleeping all morning.
I brought him cookies.
He taught me games.
Once, I touched
the soft blond beard
that glazed his cheekbones.
I could tell him anything.

Soap opera organ
rose to a frenzy
on the oval-windowed
new television
as someone yelled:
“Kidnapped!
Our son has been kidnapped!”

What’s kidnap? I ask my mother.
She, ironing, from the other room:
That’s when they steal a child
and then ask for money.

I thought it might be fun
to be kidnapped.
I might even get to keep
some of the money.

Just watch out for strange cars,
my mother warned.

One day I mentioned Eric
at the dinner table.
“That’s all he talks about,”
my mother explained.
“That’s his friend,
his imaginary playmate.”
My father grew angry.
They shouted
as I read comics in my bedroom.

One day, my father took me
to a roadside tavern.
He sat in the back
with his band leader,
played an illegal
slot machine.
They worked on “Stardust”
together, his clarinet
and Tony’s trumpet.

A strange man came in,
saw me alone,
gave me a nickel
to buy potato chips.

As my father returned,
I asked my new friend,
“Can I have another nickel?”
My father exploded,
shouted at the stranger:
“No one gives my kid money!”

The stranger left hurriedly.

Why did he go? Strangers seemed

kinder to me than parents.
I thought about kidnapped children,
sweets and sodas everywhere,
fresh bread from the oven,
mountains of comic books,

a long wait for the ransom,
maybe never.

At home, the spring-house was locked.
My mother doled out dinner:
government surplus beef
and slices of cheese
off a long square loaf.
Some nights we ate bread
and gravy and radishes.

I stayed indoors all summer.
Sometimes at night
I thought I saw someone
cross from the poplars,
to the spring-house, then back again,
a lanky form darting
from shadow to shadow.

I sleepwalked many nights,
awaking against the locked
front door. On other nights
I dreamt my own door
at the back of the closet.
I opened it, to another door,
and yet another, until sleep
vacuumed me to darkness.

I never mentioned Eric again.

Years later I heard
of the men who slept
in the nearby foothills,
setting up camp
in the abandoned ovens —
draft dodgers avoiding
the Korean War call-up.

Years after that I suddenly
remembered him again —
his soft tenor voice in the shadow,
the friend to whom I said,

“Would you kidnap me someday?
I’ll never tell . . . I promise.”

The Old Brick House at Carpentertown

by Brett Rutherford

Only a few memories define it
now that it is gone, gone
to the last brick, a place
where two roads meet
in a bramble of scrub trees
and blackberries wild:

Never turn on the lights
in the dining room:
if you flick the switch
you smell smoke
and hear a crackling sound
somewhere behind
the peeling wallpaper.

Never go down those steps
to the cellar. The rats
are there, and they own it.

Tap water is only
for taking a bath.
It is not safe to drink;
the well is poisoned
by the slow seep
of wet ash-piles
from the glowing coke-ovens.

Never go up
to the slanted attic whose one
sole window throws light
one hour a day
on the head and shoulders
of a nameless Greek.

Do not eat the dog's
worm medicine,
even if it looks like
M&Ms.

Never tell anyone
you have learned to levitate
and do not need to touch
foot to stair-tread
coming down from your bedroom.

Never tell anyone
ever again
about your imaginary
playmate. Just lie
and say you were alone.
Both voices were yours.
Smile mysteriously.

When, late at night,
you press your face
to a window pane
and an escaped blank panther,
paws on the window-sill,
regards you eye-to-eye,
tell no one.

When a great storm
comes, run to the porch
to feel the rain-lash
against your face.
Welcome the lightning.
Imagine yourself as one
of the Lombardy poplars
aching for a thunderbolt.

Carry its many rooms
inside you forever,
haunter of your own
haunted house.

The Winner

by Brett Rutherford

Damn if he didn't beat the odds!

John won the lottery.
He spent all night
listing the things he'd do
as soon as the cash
filled his house to the rafters.

Running downtown
to find a lawyer,
crosswalk-waiting
at Fifth and Smithfield

(not taking any chances
with his hundreds
of millions!)

he was struck
by a falling meteorite,
a fireball so hot
he was sublimed
to a dirt-brown cloud
that instantly dispersed.

Crowds edged
the sinkhole crater,
wondering who …

--   

The Times That Burn the Brain

by Brett Rutherford

(I hid a few rhyming poems in The Pumpkined Heart. This was one of them.)

The times that burn the brain are few:
when art commands that love be shed;
when you last expect to see the dead,
now truly gone, come into view;

when abstract thoughts become mere breath
upon the tongue, and Liberty
lies down with chains and musketry;
when you admit that gainless death

burns thousands from a tyrant brain
and murder stains your nation’s face,
as one by one the storms erase
all freedoms in a bloody rain;

to climb a hill before the dawn
and find your heart’s last village lost
into the concrete void of time,
to know the past is now beyond
your step, yourself a wordy ghost,
unchanging, in a rhyme.


1973, rev. 2019.

A Wing of Time (2019 version)

by Brett Rutherford

This little "Twilight Zone" episode narrative poem has me going back in time in 1973, revisiting the college town where I lived from 1965 to 1969. Ironic now that I felt "so much older."

This village street will always split me —
     half in the gray-fringed present,
     half quarked away in time
from dull today to that brilliant
     yesterday — a day I am not yet
     twenty and the maples seem shorter,
          the houses whiter, the sky
a bluer blue through eyes unclouded.

I stand before a dingy storefront.
Back then it was a dress shop
     with but a single mannequin.
Next to it was Gorman’s
     steamy laundromat
churning students’ underwear and towels,
a nickel-dime-quarter juggernaut
devouring stray socks, a treasuryof  lint and buttons.

Above the laundry, beyond that rotting
window-frame, was my first apartment.
Was it fifteen dollars a month I paid
for two converted office rooms,
     a hallway bathroom and shower?
Are those the same curtains still,
tattered and colorless as I found them
and left them? The same glass,
certainly, through which I watched
the leaf-fall, lightning, snowstorm,
the neon light of the Hotel Bar
(no one under twenty-one admitted!)

I see the pale green painted wall
not changed in grudging landlord years.
I climb the narrow stairs, pass down
the beer-corroded corridor to my door,
whose frosted glass was once gold-leafed
with some insurance agent’s name.

Do I do this? Are my hand, nervous,
solid enough to knock, or am I dreaming?
My tap on the glass is solid enough.
A thin blond woman answers, puzzled.
I tell her I lived her as a student,
     oh, many years ago.
Could I just stand here a moment,
look out her window at the village green? —

where someone, in unintended irony,
has placed the town’s own name
in giant wooden letters,
     as though the inhabitants
     needed to be reminded,
the traveler admonished.
Sinners, this is Edinboro!
Fathers, guard your daughters!

A wave of heat rolls through the trees outside.
Were it a wing of Time, whose darker side
enfolds the past, what memories appear?
I see the vanished store whose wooden frame
extends into the square, a blur of green
as sycamores sawed down or thunderstruck
burst back to view. A sigh of life unfurls,
the lake regains its water lily bloom,
long-dead sparrows rebuild forgotten nests,
and on the street, departed friends go by —


Squat Bertha goes to get her mail. Next door,
her restaurant slides to bankruptcy,
unpaid employees and a sheriff’s sale.
I heard her scold her harried waitresses
for wasting moldy pie. Do it like this! —
she flipped the pie-slice over deftly
then scraped a knife across the furry crust,
flipping it back to who would ever know —
now serve it with a smile! Above her store, 
she had her quart of beer, remembering
the brothel she ran in her Erie days.
The men in her rooms are boarders, students.
Deans and professors eat at her table.
Head high, she’s almost respectable now.

I see four shadows in the alleyway —
three high school boys and a slow-minded girl.
She goes there often. They catch her there,
against the wall their prying hands adept
at raising her skirt, stealing quick pleasure.
After the shadows mingle, pressed on brick,
sneakered feet scatter in every direction.  

Outside the bar, the college boys loitering
swoon as Jamie and her sketchpad pass them.
Her tied-back hair jet black, her almond eyes
Eurasian orbs of challenge and surrender.
Her breasts move through their dreams 
          like wrecking cranes.
Her siren silhouette, voice-song, Muse-call,
perfect things, untouchably sufficient.
It was enough that she existed here.

Now others pass: a student prince who died
in megalo-brainfire tumor madness;
the tragic bronchial artist coughing,
imagining consumption’s early death;
one, two, a half dozen for Vietnam,
whose jungles would cripple them, or kill them
(one whose body was never found, looks up
as though his ghost and my vision had locked);

my best friends, the mad and sad ones, strolling
on by as though I still awaited them —
the best of their time, the dreamer drop-outs,
acid, depression, poverty and war
cutting its swath through my generation.
In this interval a hundred have passed,
known and unknown, the loved and the yearned-for,
all of them still before their beginnings,
not drinking the poison of compromise,
not marrying lies, denying visions,
not using youth to engender monsters.
They do not see my future looking down,
not one of them seems coarse or mediocre.

And there, impossibly, I see myself,
a younger form, approach.
He is by all standards, pretty much
     out of his mind.
His eyes are wide with poems.
He turns and looks back at passers-by
if they happened to have beautiful eyes.
He is carrying a batch
     of his underground newspaper
     giving them out     
          to everyone he recognizes.
He enters through the door below,
his footsteps sure upon the stair.
I turn, I dash into the darkened hall.
I hide in the bathroom until he passes,
then tread my way silently
to the street, and to the present..

He only cares about the future.
I wish I could warn him.
I think he was very foolish
    to linger here,
as I was foolish to return.

Yet this is what I learned:
I always thought others the meteors,
racing on by, too hot to touch,
never quite seen or palpable.
I thought the world a-spin
away and beneath my grasp,
yet here it sits, slow in its orbit
as a banana slug.
And now I understand:
I was the meteor. I am the meteor.
I blaze through. Nothing remains
of me but these etched words.