An Exeter Vampire

by Brett Rutherford

Here is another little lesson in how line length can be used to create a special effect. This poem is about the famous Rhode Island vampire, Sarah Tillinghast, who comes back to kill off her family members one by one. (The family members most likely died of tuberculosis.) I wanted to create the effect of weakness, being out of breath, and suffocation. So instead of writing in the customary blank verse (10 syllables per line), I experimented by having the poem's lines being nine syllables long. They are cut short. The opening line, "She comes back ----- in the rain --- at midnight" is halting, 3 x 3, supporting the idea of being short of breath.

She comes back, in the rain, at midnight.

Her pale hand, not a branch, taps the glass.

Her thin voice, poor Sarah Tillinghast

whines and whimpers, chimes and summons you

to walk in lightning and will’o wisp

to the hallowed sward of the burial ground,

to press your cheek against her limestone,

to run your fingers on family name,

to let the rain inundate your hair,

wet your nightclothes to a clammy chill,

set your teeth chattering, your breath a

tiny fog within the larger mist.

You did not see her go before you,

and yet you knew she was coming here.

Soon her dead hand will tap your shoulder.

Averting your eyes, you bare your throat

for her needful feeding, your heat, your

heart’s blood erupting in her gullet.

You will smell her decay, feel the worms

as her moldy shroud rubs against you.

Still you will nurse the undead sister,

until her sharp incisors release you

into a sobbing heap of tangled hair,

your heart near stopped, your lungs exploding,

wracked with a chill that crackles the bones.

The rain will wash away the bloodstains.

You will hide your no more virginal

throat like a smiling lover’s secret.

Two brothers have already perished—

the night chill, anemia, swift fall

to red and galloping consumption.

Death took them a week apart, a month

beyond Sarah’s first night-time calling.

Honor Tillinghast, the stoic mother,

sits in the log house by the ebbing fire,

heating weak broth and johnny cakes.

One by one she has sewn up your shrouds—

now she assembles yet another.

She knows there is no peace on this earth,

nor any rest in the turning grave.

Storm ends, and bird songs predict the sun.

Upstairs, in garret and gable dark,

the children stir, weak and tubercular,

coughing and fainting, praying for breath.

The ones that suck by night are stronger

than those they feed on, here where dead things

refuse the Lord's sleep in Exeter,

sing their own epitaphs in moon-dance,

and come back, in the rain, at midnight.

_____

Exeter, Rhode Island’s “vampire” case of 1799 ended with the exhumation and destruction of the corpse of Sarah Tillinghast after four siblings followed her in death by consumption. They burned Sarah’s heart and reburied all the bodies.

Triptych: A Philosophy of Love

i
Eros,
you are a child no more:
you have grown ripe for mouths to taste,
tongued tender neck to shoulder line,
breast taut and sloping down where firm
yet yielding to a poet's fingers
what dragons beneath the belly
in longing flesh awakening!
I set my eyes upon you now
in your statue-perfect moment—
ah, winged-foot kouros, do not move!

Beneath your sandaled tread the earth
indents and hardens, hungry clay.
You swim the sea, delight the waves
foam-white with arm- and legstrokes bold;
when you turn back, the ebbing tide
tugs out and downward, desperate
like a disappointed lover.
Sea beasts thrust up green tentacles,
amazed at your beauty, craving
the hoarded air in your ribcage.

Your vanished body, diving, mocks me.
You cannot drown! The gods have much
to utter through your vocal chords!
A lifeguard zephyr transports you
above, beyond the crashing surf.
Eyes closed, you ride on mist and cloud,
immobile as marble, your hair
a boreal banner of gold
across the blind, astonished sky.

You do not see the eyes that watch you,,
do not acknowledge worshippers;
your youth an uncrossable chasm.
I hesitate to speak, my hand
in greeting grasps you too lightly.

You flee the seven-hilled city.
I watch from a bench on the summit
as you hurtle down Angell Street.
Long I linger, long I watch for you
as you turn down the twisted lanes.
But you are always departing—
your future is too much my past.

You are too beautiful to touch,
almost too beautiful to live
in our tawdry and tarnished world,
unbearable Phoebus, a searing star!

2
Philia,
           more rare than lust, more lasting,
desiring all and yet beyond desire;
the unseen walker-beside of dreamers,
first ear to my poems fresh from the pen.
You are the comforter of solitudes,
the perfect thou in silent communion.
For you the bread is baked, the teapot full,
the door unlocked, the sleeping place secure.
If you came for a day, or forever,
it is the same to me—what's mine is yours.

I swear I shall not pass a day with you
unless it be filled with astonishing things.
At night, the room you sleep in breathes with me,
the darkness between us webbed with moonlight,
cicadas heralding my dreamless sleep.

 

Scarce half a dozen times I've met you now,
soul mate and artist and fellow outsider.
How many leagues we two together walked,
how many ancient stones deciphered! Worlds
turned within us as we riddled science;
with thought alone we toppled cathedrals,
lived in all ages and nations at once,
counted as friends the poets and sages.
(These the mingled streams, the parting rivers,
the memories that are always with me,
friendship true in a world without honor,
with brothers who choose us, and whom we choose.)

3
Agape,
          rarest and last of all the affections,
you come at the end as solace to the spirit,
friend of all who cannot trade in beauty's coinage,
the vestal hope of love outliving the body.

It matters not if him you love returns your gaze.
It matters not if he chose his death by drowning,
or if his brain burned mad, or he wasted away,
or if he squandered his genius to mate and die—

it matters not to love's eidolon, in whose eye
all types of love are stippled in a deep gravure.
You are the bird-sleep stillness preceding the dawn,
the astonished hush that follows the thunderclap:
you are lord of all benevolent silences.

At the unvisited cell of hag and hermit
your threads drop down like gilded spider webs,
a boon and blessing from the ever-burning stars.
For those who dare translate your enigmatic verse,
tribe, shade and totem, time and sorrow, slip away
as all who strive become ensoul'd in one great heart.

This is the love the gods and philosophers knew—
divine yet having nothing to do with heaven—
human, yet far beyond the lusts of animals—
at alchemy's heart, the Midas wand of autumn
turning temporal green into immortal gold.

4
Always my loves are three-faced,
     triptych in unity.
Approached, they hesitate
to give their names.

One name is not enough.
Lust was too quickly slaked
to hold them long, the vows
of hollow fellowship too soon betrayed.
No one suspected the aspirant god
in their bones, defying weight,
yearning toward the zenith.

And you, my momentary captive,
caught in my weave of words,
am I to be your lover,
     brother,
     fellow spirit?

Is my yearning for hair and bones?
For hearth and soul mate?
For winged companion to Olympus?
I do not know,
     cannot define
my troubled and troubling affections.

And as for you,
     Adonis, Atys, Adonai,
who knows what you mean
by being beautiful?

Which One Are You

by Brett Rutherford

WHICH ONE ARE YOU?

after Akhmatova’s “Muza”

Ah, welcome guest, my Muse!

I wait up for you, whom no one

can compel. The candle is lit.

The pot of tea is enough for two.

There is champagne for the finish

when we have done with poetry.

All that I am or ever hope to be

is in this night’s expectation.

Freedom and glory — and youth, too — 

I offer up, when with your flute

you arrive, and the lines fill up

in perfect symmetry and flow.

I wait. Wait. At my unlocked door

that ever-so-light twice tapping

fails to come no matter how far

I lean into midnight’s silence.

Instead, from above, a wind howls.

The shutters flap-clap and shear off

from the trembling house-side. The tea

in my cup shows rolling waves.

Then, hooded and winged, one comes,

in somber and terrible robes,

tattered with cold eternity.

Oozing through the torn window screen

her bulk swells in until it fills

entire the moonlight’s trapezoid.

The room is small. She seems to take

full half of it. I huddle down.

Gentle Euterpe, laurel-browed,

this is not you, the expected!

Her silver veil she puts aside.

Her eyes fix mine with calm resolve.

Her tablet and stylus laid down,

she places one hand over mine,

the thumb-and-double-digit hold

upon my pen now led by hers.

“Millions already dead,” she says.

“And millions more to come. Commence!”

My hand shakes. I tremble. “Why me,

the merest lyric poet, why me?” —

— “Because they have not killed you yet.

And because you can.” The blank page

is filled with lines. I write till dawn.

It is done now. She moves to go.

“Which one are you?” I ask. — “The one

who whispered into Dante’s ear

the cantos of his Inferno.”—

All I can say is, dumbly, “Oh!”

Note: Anna Akhmatova's Russian poem, "The Muse," is only eight lines long, and it is one of the most perfect lyric poems ever written in any language. I have never dared to translate it, because the English version by Stanley Kunitz is so fine that I could not imagine it done better.

Only now, after decades of living with this poem, and opening all my featured readings with it, did I come to realize that there is an unexpressed secret hidden in this poem. The "turn" in the poem is when the poet asks her Muse, "Are you the one ... whom Dante heard dictate / the lines of his Inferno?" She answers, "Yes."  In Akhmatova's Russian the final word is not da, for "Yes," but ya, for I am, rhyming with dikotovala (dictate).

A spine-chilling line. But why, we ask, does Akhmatova interrogate a Muse she would seem to know so well? My answer is that this Muse is a stranger, not the one she expected.

Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry, is a gentle maiden who carries an aulos (flute) and wears a laurel wreath. Instead, her guest is, unexpectedly, Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.

Sometime later in her life, Akhmatova would be challenged to write about the horrors of Stalin's rule, when a woman standing in a line to learn the fate of prisoners challenges her, "Can you describe this?" So "The Muse" is prophetic of what a lyric poet would be called to do, and which she did in her long poem, "Requiem."

Finally, I saw a way to adapt this poem on my own terms, elaborating on it to make plain that Akhmatova's visitor is not the one she expected, and is in fact a terrifying one.

All the lines came to me yesterday upon waking. They are unrhymed eight-syllable lines, except for the final couplet. I did not think I would ever find an equivalent to Akhmatova's last two lines in English, but I think the almost unvoiced "Oh!" is a nice way round it out, and should be very effective in reading aloud.

Autumn Sundays in Madison Square

by Brett Rutherford

This poem is based on journal notes across a number of years, from the days when I lived near Madison Square Park. It was then in rather decrepit condition. I post this older poem today as a little demonstration of craft. People who think that all unrhymed poetry is just prose, and that "free verse" requires no discipline, need to look closer. This poem pulses and "breathes" because its line alternate between 10-syllable lines and 8-syllable lines, an alternation, if you will, between the formality of blank verse and the songfulness of the ballad measure. The enjambment across stanzas also forms a hook between them, so that the seams of the poem are not obvious. The allusion to "Liberty" is that the arm and hand of the Statue of Liberty stood for a time at the north end of Madison Square Park while funds were being raised for the completion of the statue.


Stately old sycamores, sentinel oaks,
     fan-leafed gingko and noble elm,
year by year your patient quest for the sun
     has sheltered such madmen, squirrels,
birds, bankers, derelicts and poets
     as needed a plot of peaceful
respite from the making and sale of things.

Poe lingered here in his penniless woe.
     Melville looked up at a whale cloud.
Walt Whitman idled on the open lawn.
     (Sad now, the ground scratched nearly bare,
Fenced off against the depredating dogs;
     the fountains dry, while standing pools
leach up from old, sclerotic water mains.)

Four chimes ring for unattended vespers,
     no one minding the arcane call,
not the bronze orators exhorting us,
     not the rollicking hounds unleashed
in the flea-infested gravel dog-run,
     not the grizzled men in boxes,
so worn from the work of all-day begging

they’re ready to sleep before the sun sets.
     A thousand pigeons clot the trees.
The northwest park is spattered with guano,
     benches unusable, a birds’
Calcutta, a ghetto a bloated squabs
     feasting on mounds of scattered crumbs,
bird-drop stalagmites on every surface!

Daily she comes here, the pigeon-lady,
     drab in her cloth coat and sneakers,
sack full of bread crusts, and millet and rice,
     peanuts and seeds from who-knows-where.
Still she stands, in the midst of offerings,
     until they light upon her shoulder,
touching her fingertips, brushing her cheeks

with their dusty, speckled wings, naming her
     name in their mating-call cooing,
luring her up to lofty parapets,
     rooftop and ledge, nest precipice
where, if she could fly, she would feed their young,
     guard their dove-bright sky dominion
from hawks, the heedless crowds, the wrecking cranes.

Across one fenced-in lawn the sparrows soar
     in V-formation back and forth,
as though they meant in menacing vectors
     to enforce the no-dog zoning.
Amid the uncut grass the squirrels’ heads
     bob up, vanish, then reappear
as the endless search for nuts and lovers

ascends its autumn apogee. But here
     the squirrels are thin and ragged,
road-kill reanimated harvesters,
     tails curled like flattened question marks
as every other morsel offered them
     is snatched by a beak or talon.
Descending birds make calligraphic curves

as branches twine in spiral chase of sun.
     Nothing is safe from scavenging —
trash barrels tipped for aluminum cans,
     the ground beneath the benches combed
for roach-ends the dealers crush and re-sell
     to law clerks and secretaries.
Even the cast-off cigarettes are taken

by derelicts and nicotinic birds.
     Certain my notes are tracking him,
a storm-tossed schizophrenic darts away.
     Beside the World War’s monument
(ah, naïve time, to conceive no second!)
     an Asian woman gardening
adds green and blossom to the shady ground

amid the place-names of trampled Belgium,
     forest and trench of invaded France.
(Not her war, certainly, not her heroes,
     yet her soft blooms, as from a grave
whisper the names of the now-dead warriors
     and sons who never come to read
of Ypres, Argonne and the barbed-wire lines.)

A welcome bookstall has opened its doors,
     as if to lure the passers-by
to read, to dream, beneath the timeless elms —
     but who can sit, immersed in book,
as suicidal leaves cascade, as hands
     shaking and thin, trade crumpled bills
for bags of bliss in crystal, crack or powder?

Is this the potter’s field of shattered dreams?
     The copper arm of Liberty
once stood at the northern end of the square.
     The trees once soared. Now roots eat salt,
brush against steam pipes and rusted cable,
     cowed by courthouse, statues frowning,
Gothic and Renaissance insurance spires.

Only the branches, forgiving, forgetting,
     redeem this purgatory place.
A Druid stillness draws here at dusktime,
     squirrel and bird and runaway
equally blessed as the hot-ash sunset
     gives way to the neon-lit night,
city unsleeping beneath the unseen stars.

—New York City/ Weehawken/ Providence
1996/1998/2001

It Has Found You

by Brett Rutherford


     after a painting by Magritte


What you thought
the sky of freedom
was but the painted back
of your mirror. No wonder
you saw yourself in the universe,

no wonder you kept
the blackout curtains open
as the world watched
you dress and undress.
The sun never set
on your mindful audience.

Your guilts are white-washed:
those seven broken hearts
entombed in acute pyramids
issue no cries, nor do
they bleed onto your carpet.

Your empire is fallen now.
The game is up, presaged
by the breaking of the glass
of your false diorama.

Your former sky
is a gray wall – tomb
or prison, madhouse or void? —
whatever your actual
place of residence, the eye
on the worm-end of an optic nerve
is crawling toward you. Blinkless
and unforgiving, it snakes
inexorably toward you. Liar,
thief, and love-absconder,
it has found you!

On the Verge: Poets of the Palisades III

Edited by Paul Nash, Denise La Neve, Susanna Rich, John J. Trause, and David Messineo. The Poets of the Palisades shine in their third anthology of new and memorable works — 142 poems from 80 poets. All have had featured readings in the series sponsored by the North Jersey Literary Community in Teaneck, NJ (founded 1997) and the High Mountain Meadow Poetry Series in Wayne, NJ (founded 2017). For these tumultuous times of environmental crisis, bad politics, pandemic, and unrest, the editors selected submitted poems and arranged the best into eleven themed sections.

These works, of our time, are on the verge, or, as editor Paul Nash indicates, “In transition … about to change … at the point where something may occur … in anticipation … to extend outward toward the unknown … nearing the likely or inevitable attainment of some state of being … to approach a barrier, boundary or portal … at an event horizon … crossing a permeable membrane … to reach the outer margins of something different or unexpected.”

This publication, issued simultaneously in print and ebook formats in the midst of a national pandemic and social distancing, tests the community of poets and artists in its pages with the challenge of continuing to read together (virtually), and to be read by the many friends and supporters of poetry on the “wrong side” of the Hudson River. Poetry will prevail, on line, on screen, and in print.

POETS AND ARTISTS IN THIS ANTHOLOGY: Joel Allegretti, Renée Ashley, Donna Baier Stein, Amy Barone, John Barrale, Caterina Belvedere, Norma Ketzis Bernstock, Michael McKeown Bondhus, Laura Boss, Theresa Burns, Laurie Byro, Kevin Carey, Cathy Cavallone, John Chorazy, David Crews, Jessica de Koninck, Erica Desmond, Catherine Doty, Juditha Dowd, Sandra Duguid, Jane Ebihara, James C. Ellerbe, R.G. Evans, Tom Fitzpatrick, Ellen Foos, Laura Freedgood, Davidson Garrett, Deborah Gerrish, Henry Gerstman, Suzanne Gili Post, George Guida, Barbara Hall, Therése Halscheid, Patrick Hammer Jr., Karen Hubbard, Pamela Hughes, Josh Humphrey, Paul Kuszcyk, Vasiliki Katsarou, Tina Kelley, Adele Kenny, Janet Kolstein, Elaine Koplow, Denise La Neve, Susanna Lee, Joel Lewis, Timothy Liu, Roy Lucianna, Mary Makofske, Charlotte Mandel, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, David Messineo, Marilyn Mohr, Gene Myers, Paul Nash, James B. Nicola, Priscilla Orr, Wayne Pierson, Tom Plante, Jennifer Poteet, Morton D. Rich, Susanna Rich, Denise Rue, Alison Ruth, Brett Rutherford, Yuyutsu Sharma, Danny Shot, Carole Stone, Heather Strazza, John J. Trause, Doris Umbers, David F. Vincenti, Emily Vogel, BJ Ward, Galen Warden, Joe Weil, Barbara R. Williams-Hubbard, George Witte, Dave Worrell, Anton Yakovlev, David Yazzi, Michael T. Young, Donald Zirilli, Sander Zulauf.

Cover design by Galen Warden. Book design & typography by Brett Rutherford.

ISBN 9798650452249. 284 pages, paperback, 6x 9 inches. $19.95 from Amazon. Ebook for $4.99 (link to come).

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