Two Times Haunted

by Brett Rutherford

freely adapted from an Anglo-Saxon poem, “Scael se gaest cuman”

Two times, and two times only,
the soul returns to the body.

Your ghost shall come,
groaning and grievous,
when seven nights have passed.

If your mischance it is
to be the unburied dead,
it shall sit upon your breast

as though at feast
with raven, hawk and vulture.

It shall not deter them, tears
not of water made, cries
not of mortal mouth sounded,
hand ineffectual to beat
the carrion carnival away.

Or if you be in earth, fresh loam
upon the well-wept grave,
round it shall walk three times,
and on the slightest wind
its keening is imperceptible
to all but the smiling worms
as they begin the long business.

Add to your death night
three hundred years.

From where and when the souls
go about their grim reckoning,
it shall come to you again,
searching you out among ruins
and toppled stones, burned-out
buildings and places whose names
have become unpronounceable.

Still, none but witch or wizard

would be the wiser of its coming.

Frail and shrill, a dusty cobweb
of what you once were,

trailing its brittle fingers
amid the dust of the boneyard,
marking your skull among a heap
of your contemporaries, cast
into an ossuary pit, or
down to dust among forgotten urns.

Then shall its sad voice accuse you:
“Gory dust! why did you torture me
with the foulness of earth,
the agonized rot to clay returning?

“In all your idle days, did you think
to lay up a treasure for me? You lived,
you slept, you made love obliviously,
you lied and grew rich, averted your eye
from art or music or human charity.

“Why have I nothing to lay
at the feet of the cosmos
that has your name upon it?
Why for three hundred years
did you torture me,
you, the mere food of worms!”

The Pumpkined Heart Now Available

Brett Rutherford published The Pumpkined Heart in 1973 as a 48-page illustrated chapbook. Now, almost a half-century later, he has assembled all of his poems that have Pennsylvania as their locale, into one huge book, a kind of personal memoir in poems.

Three towns figure in this saga that spans early childhood to college years: Scottdale, in the coal and coke district when the skies were black with smoke and fumes from the coke-ovens; West Newton, a grim steelworkers’ town hugging the steep banks of the Youghiogheny River; and Edinboro, a college town in the northwest corner of the state, its placid lake setting contrasting with the tumult of Vietnam-era protest.

From early childhood in Scottdale, the poet casts himself as an outsider, breaking rules, recruiting neighbor children to act in “monster shows,” absorbing Native American lore from a story-telling grandmother, and learning about the Golem legend from Jewish neighbors. The other side of his family life is “out home,” where his maternal grandparents live in squalor in a tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets, left an indelible impression that emerges in “memory poems,” written many decades later. In “Peeling the Onion,” a grandmother relates to him the dark side of living alone in the mountains, and “the kinds of things that happen to women.”

Four high-school years in West Newton with a degenerating family and an evil stepfather are lightened by self-discovery: “I was a poet. A cape would trail behind me always.” Here he studies Latin, writes his first poems, and deepens his abiding love of the Gothic in literature and film. The fantasy poem “Son of Dracula” celebrates artistic birth, and “Mr. Penney’s Books” gratefully recalls the town’s one mentor for the unruly young, a bibliophile with 10,000 books.

Readers turning to the Edinboro section of this book will be startled by the transformation of theme and mood. Rutherford attaches himself to the town’s glacial lake, its flora and fauna, its sharp seasonal divides, and weaves them into a Whitmanesque vision. These poems, while modern in style, are in the spirit of Shelley, Whitman, Rilke, and Jeffers. Returning to the locale again and again over many decades for renewal and recollection, the poems celebrate what the poet calls, “my first-found home.” Other poems lift the veil on the student life of the time, and the choices one had to make about war or resistance.

The last section of the book, “Looking Backward,” includes retrospective poems, written from far away, that look back on the childhood places and events, rather than the straight-forward story-poems earlier in the book.

The longer poems here are stories in verse, several of them with multiple voices, most notably the four-voice tale, “The Doll Without A Face.” But all the poems are clear, easily read aloud, and aimed at the reader who may be wary of poetry.

This is the 286th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published April 2020. 320 pages, 6 x 9 inches, paperback. $19.95. ISBN 9798639218460.

https://www.amazon.com/Pumpkined-Heart-Poems-Pennsylvania/dp/B087FGYZG4

At the Grave of the Suicide

by Brett Rutherford

     For S.F.

O Beauty, O Beauty,
     O Beauty too good for the world,
how you do rob us by your removal!
What was the use of your death
except to those who stand and weep?
Who must, in one life,
fill, and refill the cup of grief,
so early, and so many times?

I come to your stone,
my exhortation useless,
the gifts I gave or would have given
refused or cast back by the grave.
What would I not have given to save you?

If only magic could bring you back,
I would sit here with ring and book
until the world collapsed
     into its core of iron,
until the loam of the soil parted
and your dark laughter exploded
the long-sealed vault below!

If only souls were immortal!
(The heart breaks, wishing it were so,
hoping to force from nature
what it cannot give)

The weighted stone,
the too-deep water,
the ignominy of a found body,
the pointless inquest,
the baffled, pained, guilty faces
of the left-behind.

The poem you earned
is not the one
I wanted to give.

New York's Infamous Potter's Field

This morning I made up a chapbook of my two poems about new York City's "Island of the Dead," in infamous potter's field on Hart Island. Venice has an island cemetery full of magnificent monuments: New York's island cemetery is made of trenches dug by convicts and piled up three-high with the coffins of the unclaimed dead.

Here is the book, free to download and read:

https://archive.org/details/rutherford-the-island-of-the-dead/mode/2up

The Inhuman Wave -- Free Sample Pages

SAMPLE OF NEW NEXT BOOK, SOON TO COME AT AMAZON.

Spanning just one year of Brett Rutherford's poetic output, this 264-page collection shows the American neo-Romantic, Gothic poet at the peak of his powers. The new poems include biting satires and laments about the current decline of the United States, as might be expected from a self-professed "outsider." But there are many facets to this dazzling kaleidoscope of a book: childhood memories of the coal and coke towns of his Pennsylvania childhood; riveting narratives such as that of a freezing woman going from door to door begging for coal, or a grandmother telling her grandson about "the things that happen to women" living alone in the country; and memories of college years overshadowed by the Vietnam War. The supernatural, as always plays a large role, as an invisible monster lurks in a Pennsylvania swamp, angry Native American spirits pop the windows off skyscrapers and snap the wings off airplanes, Medieval thieves are magically prevented from robbing an Abbey; and the tale of a Danish girl, a raven, and her lover's eyeball. One of the darkest poems here is an imagined monologue of the crazed military Roman Emperor Domitian, as he leads a group of senators and oligarchs into his subterranean "Black Room."

Translations from Spanish, French, Old English, German, Danish, and Old Norse show the poet working in the tradition of American poets such as Longfellow, tapping the poems and lore of other times and cultures, yet making of them new works that delight (and caution) today's reader. Rutherford does not employ rhyme, so these adaptations flow like highly-condensed sketches or stories. At the heart of this book is a poem cycle started four decades ago and only now finished, an adaptation and expansion from German Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies, titled Fatal Birds of the Soul. It transcends any label, not translation, not mere adaptation, swallowing the lines of Rilke into a web of interrogations.

The book also includes another cycle, as far from serious German verse as can be imagined. Titled Buster, or The Unclaimed Urn, it is an imaginary cat book about the adventures of a winged housecat. Based on notes left behind by poet Barbara A. Holland, this long narrative poem shows what happens when two Gothic poets attempt to write a "children's book." Of course no child would ever be allowed to read a book about drowned kittens, eating mice, and the horrors of being "snipped" at the veterinarian's office.

Here are some sample pages.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD.

Fatal Birds of the Soul -- Free Sample

SOON TO BE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON. HERE ARE THE FIRST FOUR POEMS.

FROM THE POET'S NOTES ABOUT THIS BOOK: “The work on these poems started in 1976, an attempt to translate, adapt, and expand upon the first two of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. The project was abandoned, the sketches only rediscovered in late 2019. In April 2020, I decided to complete the project, revising and expanding the original sketches and making them into a connected cycle of 21 poems.

“This cycle is in no way an explication of Rilke, and the German poet would doubtless be horrified at the thought of a young atheist, neo-Romantic American poet of the 1970s making a palimpsest over his work, with the shades of Shelley, Walt Whitman, Poe, and even H. P. Lovecraft looking over his shoulder. That Rilke himself stepped away from the Elegies after writing the first two, only returning to the project some years later, gives some indication of the daunting power of Elegies 1 and 2. I, too, unsure of what I had done, and what was to be done with it, put the project aside.

“Some of my recent work with translations and adaptations gave me the self-confidence to return to this perilous project, this time trusting my own voice and letting even more expansion emerge from the original material. If I have succeeded, Rilke’s own words fit seamlessly into the flow of my own. I was in his thrall for a number of years, and his Letters to a Young Poet gave me comfort and inspiration when it was not coming from those around me. I already had a sense that in poems such as this, one is being “lived through” by language, creating a freestanding work that has its own existence, its own right to be.

“To illustrate this book I turned to some of the Greek sculpture that makes clear some of Rilke’s language about the vocabulary of touching in classic sculpture, and I was able to find a photo of the Latin tomb inscription Rilke found in Venice and copied down. I introduced the god Hermes, who, as a messenger of the gods, served the same role as messenger angels to the Greeks. These visual embellishments may help the reader recreate the visual elements of Rilke’s musings on angels, on sculpture, and on Beauty in general."

This is the 287th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published JUne 2020. 62 pages, 6 x 9 inches, soon to be on Amazon.

  READ SAMPLE POEMS HERE.

Summer of 1967: Cleveland, Ohio

by Brett Rutherford

Cityscape to townscape

   Concrete to clapboard

      Cleveland to nameless tree-

         lined hydrant peppered

            dogwalk

Streets seen from the blur of bus yet

   slowing, limning in slant

      of afternoon for me

twenty years old on my first journey West,
Walt Whitman’s poetry open on my lap,
atop it the journal I am writing in

         this slice of nation:

The lonely boy on the porch

   this Ohio summer of '67

      looks up, sees me

         seeing him, writing

            him here on this page —

perched on this pile of Whitman,

   Connecticut Yankee, damnable

      Moby Dick (my transcon-

      tinental shelf of books)

And old Walt said: look at him.

   A long red light permitting, I looked.

   He smiled, not as if at any one

   of the tinted faces of dusty green

   Grey-monoxide-hound,  but at me —

he regarded me as intently as I, him —

And Walt whispered:
There are wonderful secrets everywhere,

and one of them is that you and he are a poem.

      Sidewalk — a boy and a girl

      wave to the porch boy      he waves

      distractedly, still looking at me,
my eye locks on him as my pen
scribbles on, robotically.

My pen hand  begins to tremble.
Oh, this moment, Walt!

Would that I stopped and had spoken to you,

blond Ohio, I think I might have loved you,

   and you as well might have loved me —

I saw nothing else and hills

   turned to plains,

   to seas of swept green,

saw only eyes and a tousled-haired

   boy head blue-eyed with parted lips
asking my name and are we a poem?

And would I not later find

that there are always eyes

that flash and promise everything,
and that I must do the same in return,
whatever the cost —

   at forty miles an hour and the states

   still whisking by, I am still thinking of him.

I marvel, but Walt has taught me well
already, that one can love so much
and be loved in an instant
of recognition.

Was he merely beautiful,

this never-forgotten fleeting one?
Or has he remembered the fire
of one glance that led him to books,
to a world beyond the lake-front porch?

And if the War did not come and take him,
did he not walk too with the good gray Poet
and make his way West to glory?

The Agony of Orchids

by Brett Rutherford

What can they mean to you,

this line of courtiers?

Why do they come and go
as though they had keys
of their own to your dwelling?

Do they not blush when they pass
one another in the stairwell?

So much simpler, so free
of collisions is our pact
of mutual avoidance!

There floats another
in the nearby lagoon;
I hear tell of a self-hanging.

I leave to them the horror
of loving you

(they warm you
against the night-black chill
that is our greater love);

to them, the pain
of your gay dismissal,

to them,  the anguish
     of your pearly laugh,

the agony of orchids
     you cultivate
     to bloom from suicides;

I leave to them

     the only fit reward

     for loving you —

a Carnival death,
knives drawn
     by unknown strangers
all with the same face,
identical daggers
thrust from gloved hands
in a whirl of black dominos.

I watch, I count,
I bide my time.

—1968/1979/19985, rev 2020

Things Done in Cities

by Brett Rutherford

My Hudson-cliff view from Weehawken
does not efface the smear of it,
Manhattan clogged in its own soot,
the river gray-black with sinister flotsam.
The shade of sycamores and elms,
the brace of breeze and lambent sun,
the promise of golden reflections
if we wait for sunset — these things
cannot negate my friend Boria's lament:

"Peaceful from here, a birdflight
removed, a squint of street.
But still, the thought of the prostitutes,
the gaudy porno shops,
the thought of what might touch you
if you walked along Forty-Second Street.
How have we grown so base?"

I need but close my eyes
to remember slick Dimitrios
and his harem of underage
no-names, and how he sold
his brother's son to slavers
under the eyes of the officers.

Where?
On the steps of the Parthenon.
And when?
Just twenty-three times
a hundred years ago.

Weehawken NJ, Oct 2, 1982, rev. 2020

Dead of Prose at 29

by Brett Rutherford

 

In memoriam, Stuart Milstein, January 1977, aet. 29)

1

A flash of light in his skull
and the bulb burned out,
the moth whose wingbeat
blinked in his eyes
has fled, the vacancy
of irises draw cold inside,
down veins into his arms.

He had turned his back on poems.
Fiction he would conquer,
and be a critic, too.
The typewriter hummed,
plots cooled, awaiting
a thrust, a denouement,
a theory to end all theories
that did not come.

The inkwell from which
the poems had come
was dry, a broil of verse
on scraps of notepads.

Five days the Muse came by
and knocked, pacing the hall
in fear and jealousy.
What was he doing?
Who did he think he was,
Dostoyevsky? Proust?


She hid on the stairs
when they broke down the door,
her cry a tiny lament
in their more shrill alarm.

Had he written himself to death?
This mortal coil so easily shed,
just after the tender leaves
of his tender book of poems
had broken the soil,
and withered, unnoticed.

Careless, somehow, of risk,
eschewing cures; a secret smile
at abandoned regimens,

he was a backslid vegetarian
inviting the tusks of herbivores;
and, epileptic,
he put aside his medicine.

He courted Death
in haze of Eden lost.
There had been a woman,
a European dark lady,
and all had not gone well.

Alone in Brooklyn at twenty-nine;
the knock at the door
three times,
   the dreaded Guest,
the flash in his brain,
no time to —

Alone in his book
his poems are glass:
inside, his eyes
stare back at me.

What is one to do
at such catastrophe?

His tiny book,
like all others,
is but an Icarus
in sun-fire.

Who reads? Who notices?
Who wants to meet us
because of the words we weave?

2
I was his publisher.
I carry his book about
like a little tombstone.

He was disconsolate
as we walked in Prospect Park
that no one had noticed
the few review copies
he had cajoled me to mail.

"It doesn't help," I told him.
"America hates poetry." —

 "It doesn't help to be Jewish,"
he told me. Naïve, I answered,
"What does that mean? I envy
your being Jewish." — "How envy?" —
"You know who you are. You know
where your ancestors came from.
The rest of us don't even know
where our grandparents came from.
We are mostly barbarians."

He shook his head. I didn't understand
that even poetry could be consigned
to a ghetto, and in our time.

Poets must be made
of stronger stuff.

It is a life that chooses us,
and we must take it
with all its perils and costs.

The Muse is unforgiving,
and as for Prose,
     well, that will never do.


It's almost enough
to get you killed.

 — Written 1/20/1977, expanded and revised 4/24/2020