by Brett Rutherford

THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS

 

i

Although base Nature made us
     and will have its way,
we bow our heads in thankfulness
that we do not live in a universe
where all the food is gray.

  

ii

Just halfway through
the holiday repast,
the room explodes
in fisticuffs,
     drawn knives
and a pool of blood
on the dining room floor. 

That’s how Thanksgiving ends,
as every hostess knows,
if too small a bird provokes
an insufficiency of stuffing.

 

iii

Sixth place at table
reserved for Squanto’s ghost.
Over the steaming corn,
turkey and gravy,
cranberry red
he utters the words
his people would one day rue:
“Welcome, Englishmen!”

 

iv

Apocryphal feast
we learn about
as we droop
from sauce and stuffing:

 An immense turkey
stuffed with a duck entire,
its swollen cavity
crammed with a hen,

into whose bosom
three pigeons,
stuffed with quail,

each tiny quail
engulfing one minute
hummingbird.

 As we walk home,
wine-warmed and down
in our vigilance,
will some vast hand
sweep downwards
from the kettle-black sky —

 and after a suitable
cleaning and marinade,
will we be stuffed
in turn inside
some vast and whale-like
cavity, waiting to bake
slowly and tenderly for those
who know Earth
as the food planet?

 

(November 2015)

From "The Elves" by Ludwig Tieck (1811)

Modernized and adapted by Brett Rutherford from a version by Thomas Carlyle. 

A WHILE LATER THE ferryman came across the river, and told them new wonders. As it was growing dark, a stranger of large size had come to him, and had hired his boat till sunrise, but with this condition, that the boatman should remain quiet in his house — at least should not cross the threshold of his door. “I was frightened,” continued the old man, “and the strange bargain would not let me sleep. I slipped softly to the window, and looked toward the river. Great clouds were driving restlessly through the sky, and the distant woods were rustling fearfully. My whole cottage shook, and moans and lamentations glided around it. Then, suddenly, I saw a white streaming light that grew broader and broader, like many thousands of falling stars. Sparkling and waving, it proceeded forward from the dark fir-ground, moved over the fields, and spread itself along toward the river. 

“Then I heard a trampling, a jingling, a bustling, and rushing, nearer and nearer. It went forward to my boat, and all stepped into it, men and women, as it seemed, and children, and the tall stranger ferried them over. In the river, by the boat, were swimming many thousands of glittering forms; in the air white clouds and lights were wavering; and all lamented and bewailed their journey. I heard voices calling in lament and phrases like “far away! — our home is lost! — the poor fir trees! — the guardians! — our beautiful home! — far away! — quickly! — quickly!” And with these scattered phrases came a music so sad that my heart nearly burst to listen to it. 

“The next wave to cross the river were so horrible that I can scarce describe them. Tall figures, gaunt and faceless — they had mouths which groaned but otherwise no faces at all! — came by wearing long, dun cloaks, and over their shoulders were folded-up membranous wings. I had to avert my eyes lest I faint on the spot. They carried a number of their kind who were attached to tree branches, festooned like bats or tree-snakes. These, it seems, were crippled and could not walk, so they bore them like pigs trussed to a roasting on fir branches. No man should ever have to look on such beings.

“They all passed, and then the voices ceased. The noise of the rudder and the water creaked and gurgled for a while, and then suddenly there would be silence. Many a time the boat landed, and went back, and was again filled up. Many heavy casks, too, they took along with them, which multitudes of horrid-looking little fellows carried and rolled — whether they were devils or goblins, Heaven only knows. 

“Then a stately train came, in waving brightness. It seemed to be led by an old man, mounted on a small white horse. All of the last of them were crowding around him. I saw nothing of the horse but its head; for the rest of it was covered with costly glittering cloths and trappings, splendid beyond anything our lords and barons could mount. On his brow the old man had a crown, so bright that, as he came across, I thought the sun was rising there and the redness of the dawn glimmered into my eyes. Thus it went on all night. Even though marvels piled upon marvels, I at last fell asleep in the tumult, half in joy, half in terror. 

“In the morning all was still. But the river is, as it were, run out, and it is so shallow now that I do not know how I am to use my boat in it now. You can wade across, and there is not a fish to be seen.”

FROM THE FORTHCOMING YOGH AND THORN BOOK, Wake Not the Dead: Continental Tales of Terror. This is one episode of a longer story.

The Ruins of Rome

by Brett Rutherford

adapted from Par tibi, Roma, nihil

     by Hildebert of Lavardin, c. 1103 CE.

 

To you, Rome, to you, now nearly all in ruins,
nothing can be equal. Nothing! Shattered, you still
show us the greatness of your vast entirety.
Long ages have destroyed your pride, and Tiber's flood
both Caesars' tombs and gods' temples have swallowed up.
Only the bull-frog trumpets atop triumphal arches.

All that labor, all for naught, even in Rome far-flung:
from road to aqueduct to standing Janus-stone,
to the distant river Aras whose trembled rage
shrugged off a great Augustan span, and now regrets
the loss of that which brought the caravans of salt
and spice, and for the flow's god, fragrant offerings.

Rome! which swords of kings and the considerate care
of the Senate, beneath the kind gaze of the gods,
established itself to be the world's capital:
how was it that one man, Caesar, came to rule it all?
He rose by bribe, by pledge, by dint of lineage,
by Caesar's daughter's marriage bed, by Pompey's head,
by loyal, well-paid army poised before the gate.

Yet somehow, guarded by indulgent gods, men built
this place with pious hands, ever aware of how
the Tiber's down-flow from stream and mountain pushed back
with even-tempered spirit the unwelcome tides.
And thus from near and far they brought the broad timbers,
marble, mortar, gypsum, clay, gold and porphyry.
The rocks of its own earth became the city's walls.
Rich Romans poured their treasures into its building,
craftsmen their genius in a life of proud making;
wealth of all lands in trade flowed into its coffers.

Fallen city! who can but stand here stupefied,
robbed of any fine words except to mumble, "Rome was!"
No wearing-away by wind or time, invaders'
fires or slashing swords, can fully obliterate
this city's ageless glory. For ruin itself
is more sublime than all its parts — greater than what
remains, greater than what was lost. Even if all
were restored, its weight of sorrow would sink the heart.
The broken statues, mended, would be the wiser
for their pain; the violated tombs would cry
no less for retribution with re-molded roofs.

But — idle thought! — Rome is so vast a ruin now,
no one could put it back the way it was, nor could
some mighty power come to level it utterly.
Oh, they may come with new wealth and the gods' favor;
they may with new hands carve human figures as once
the Roman artists and their Greek masters made them,
but who would expend, with crane and scaffold, the work
of rebuilding the shattered, tumbled Roman walls,
or even to restore one god's neglected shrine?

Statues and portrait busts, triumphal reliefs, all
the sarcophagi and funereal stones: what
visages! Even the gods are amazed to see
their own images (such as remain unburied),
wanting to be as fair again as these false masks,
for Nature never made the gods with faces such
as these, faces which human hands alone devised,
faces still numinous with human admiration,
boy-god and goddess, and all-Father Jupiter
frozen in one perfect moment, and for all time.

O happy ruin! And who is your master now?
You were always better kingless, or when enthroned
by rulers who could turn in shame from broken faith.

9/27/2020

 

 

 

Opera Sundays

by Brett Rutherford

Sundays we flock to the alley lane
where the Manfredis live. Grandma
Manfredi, who speak-a no English,
defies the Blue Laws and sells us
from the cool shadow of cellar door,
soda pop in 16-ounce bottles. We hand
her quarters and dimes. A half-dollar,
heavy and mint-new shiny, alarms her.
When she counts to make change,
we giggle and stamp feet impatiently.
"That's a five," she says, "and a five,"
and then her eyes move over and down
an imagined arithmetic lesson. "No!"
we shout when she counts it wrong,
and she starts all over again, down
and over in her nonexistent abacus.

While most run off
with soda and straw, I linger,
pass by the basement window
where Signor Manfredi plays
his antique big-horn Victrola.
I listen, rapt, as Caruso sings
Vesti la giubba over and over,
the high-arced aria ending
with the heart-break sobbing
of the jilted clown. Each time
he lifts the needle and arm
to restart the record, Signor
Manfredi himself is sobbing.

Ridi, Pagliacci!

Around the run-down house's
other side, above the arbor
festooned with ripening grapes
the buxom Mrs. Manfredi,
Sophia Loren beautiful,
above a geranium window-box
pretends to read, and leans
into the sunrays to show herself,

as in the window across from her,
a shirtless young man
with another Victrola plays Gigli
in the seductive serenade
that only Lola understands
as Cavalleria Rusticana unfolds
its lurid infidelities. He mouths
the words and stares and stares
at Mrs. Manfredi.

She smiles and blushes. The chest
of the shirtless man swells
as he would have her believe
his mouth and lungs were singing.

His eyes dart at her.
The clown in the basement
suspects nothing, he seems to say,
as he goes back to the Victrola
and starts the serenade anew.

Sunday afternoon,
as every Italian knows,
is for opera.

The Face-Eater

 

by Brett Rutherford

 

“When you see millions of the mouthless dead”

— Charles Hamilton Sorley, 1915

 

War stories? Now, a man like me is full
of them, and some that can’t be told
until I’ve had had a pint. You’ve stood me three
and so I’ll tell the best o’ them. Not that
you’d be able to write it down and publish it.
Some things are not ‘fit for print,’ you know.

A borderline there is when it comes to sex,
and death, and there are things to say
that are so horrible that the mind erases it.

This one story, I swear, an’ it happened —
as I was the one to which it happened —
I can tell a stranger the tale entire,
and at the end he’ll pale up, excuse
himself, go to the loo for a good up-puke,
and then come back all smilin’ and like
“So weren’t you going to tell me
that ‘worst thing that ever happened’ t’ya?”

“I did,” I say. “I told it all
and it sloughed off your mind like rain
off a well-oiled slicker.” “Did not,” he says,
and wants a fist in face
before he goes off sputtering. “You cheat,”
he grumbles, “I doubt you even saw the War.”

So you, with that shiny new tape machine,
maybe you stand a chance to hear it
and not to go amnesia on me. Private O’Brien
I am, London Irish, and here’s my medal. That?
That is my tag, O’BRIEN, you see. That’s for
Roman Catholic and proud of it, rank, serial, unit.
Out you went with two around your neck,
and wi’ two you came back, or not at all.

We were north of Loos, west o’ Hulloch.
Our own gas had swept before us, bad stuff,
and had accomplished little. The Boche
dug in. Half of the gas blew back
into our faces; the gas masks fogged
so bad you went insane from not seein’.

You heard o’ Loos? I’m not surprised.
Ten thousand went up and over, first wave —
eight thousand lay dead and dying. The Boche
had never seen so many casualties, not crows
enough in Europe to peck their eyes out. A halt
was called to let us retreat with our wounded.

An’ where was I? In the thick of it. A shell
concuss’d so hard nearby it threw me
from a hilltop into a a muddy ravine.
I could not feel my fingers and toes.
I thought me spine was split and that
would be the end of me. No more O’Brien,
no more eels, pubs, ales or whiskey.

All I could see was the gray-green cloud
of the gas and gun-smoke, all underlit
as now and then a flare went up. The sun
was like a glowing coal behind it, and set.
Night came. No moon. No stars. Damn
if it didn’t storm a bit. A thunderclap
and two trees toppled over me, blighted,
scarred and already leafless poplars they were.

And in that flicker-flash of flare and lightning
I made out a fellow soldier, flat like me,
but free o’ the tree’s wreckage, knocked out
or dead on the ground, face up. “Ho!”
I called, but he could only groan at me.
A goner, I thought. All had gone quiet.
Cease fire? But would the medics come?
Would they see me down this blasted gully?

2

An’ so, alone I lay. Nothin’ to think on
but the slow way my arms and legs came back
into feelin’. I could move! I could move.
I started to push the fallen tree above me,
so I could clear enough to crawl my way out.
But still I had no strength. I could not raise myself.
So I fell back to thinking and remembering
and how the mind turns in a time like this
to ‘what’s the worst that could happen’?

It was McGregor, our battle-scarred Captain,
who took his turn at horror-telling, late
of a recent night on the last dregs of tea,
who told of a recent wave of mutilations.
“Casualties come back in such a state,
the stretcher bearers pile them up like logs.
One look and you know they’re goners.
Men with no faces left, no way
to stitch or heal. If not already dead
they’d be gone within hours.” — “No faces left?”
young Sorley challenged. “What does that mean?” —
“Flesh torn clean off,” McGregor said.
“Mouthless. Noseless. Earless. Blood red,
a death mask, white eyes and gaping teeth.” —

“The mouthless dead. The mouthless dead.”
Sorley repeated it twice. Taking his notebook,
he wrote that down. “Would not a mortar —”
“No explosion did that,” McGregor insisted.
“Some screamed as they were carried in.
Bitten, they said. Bitten. By what, I ask?”

Sorley had lived among the Germans, knew them.
“Dogs, then,” he offered. “Boche dogs.
The Germans and Austrians are keen on hunting.
The officers are seen about with mastiffs.
Trained to kill, they go for the face.”

McGregor grunted at this. “Some dainty Boche
general in lederhosen and hunting horns
prancing around the battlefield? Setting
his dogs on supine, wounded soldiers? What sport
is that? Is that what war has come to?”
Sorley went on about The Iliad, of warriors
left on the field of Troy that went to dogs’
breakfast if they were not collected.
The Scotsman would have none of it.
“’T is something else, I say. ’T is someone else.”

Talk turned to ghosts, Valkyries and Norns,
but no one’s mythical monster could rob
a man of his face, his very soul it seemed.

3

My eyes were closed, I guess, as I brooded
on Sorley and McGregor, two Captains
of different minds. My blood ran cold
at the thought of a pack of mastiffs loose
and smelling out two men in a ravine.
I reached for my gear. I found my rifle.
My ammunition was safe and dry.
Even this prone I could fire a shot.

And then the branches stirred above me.
Up in the toppled tree there stood,
in silhouette against the chlorine-colored cloud,
a woman’s figure, an apron white,
wide skirt, a glowing cap. She had
a swaddled infant close to her, looked down
upon my misery. “Nurse!” I called.

But who would send a nurse out here
amid the shells and bullets? Where
were the medics, the carriers?
Nimbly she descended the fallen trunk,
then stood above me. Gently she lay
the sleeping, silent infant beside me
and crouched there attentively. “Help me!”
I pleaded. “I need to sit up.”
I strained to get my nonresponsive
muscles working. Almost, but no.

She shook her head. Her dress, I saw,
was not a nurse’s uniform. A peasant dress
it was, a farm woman’s apron over it,
not virgin white but soiled and stained.
She put her face close to mine.
“Afraid,” she said, with no accent.
“I am alone. Afraid.” Her hand
touched mine. Cold, it trembled.

I took it, held it. Poor creature,
some dweller of a nearby hovel,
some wood-hut they missed
in the evacuation, she had walked
every which way in the battle, shell-shocked
and mad with grief and fear.
“What is your name?” I asked. « Comment
t’appelle ? » She smiled a little “Michelle.”

4

She lay next to me on the damp earth
and like a trusting sister lay her head
upon my shoulder. I did not resist.
A shell burst somewhere. Closer she came
as if to hide her face in my uniform.

And then, as if of its own accord, my arm
so gently enfolded her, and I felt
down there a shameful stirring, no more
nor less than what a man should feel
with such a soft creature again’ him,
but here, now, terrible and wrong.
Yet part of me exulted to know
the shell-shock was wearing off.

As if she knew what I was about,
her mouth went up beneath my ear,
which she so playfully licked, then bit
in a teasing, kitten way, my earlobe.

Though I protested, “No!” and turned my head,
she was not turning back. Her mouth found mine,
a tongue-dart and another playful bite.
Has any man ever been so tempted, to lay
with a woman amid a battlefield? Who would
not want to have that as a story to tell?

The lightning came once more, and lit us up.
Her eyes reflected red. Her face, I saw,
was not a pretty one. Hard lines, a scar,
pock marks and hairy patches, a nose
like a sculptor’s accident, and what for hair
I cannot reckon. Has any man not lain
with any woman at hand, any at all,
if he thought death upon him?
The thing down there still wanted her.
The thing at the base of my skull would rip
her peasant garb aside and take her,
beast to beast. This what men are,
and doubly so when soldiers together, and angry.

I do admit, as I have said back home
to my confessor, that I both wanted and loathed
this desperate creature. But when her hands
deftly and expertly undid my trousers,
I froze. Not even the Paris prostitutes
did such a thing. You got a woman ready.
You showed yourself. If she approved,
you gave it to her. A woman who went
for you that way was worse than a beast.
I did not know the word, then — a succubus,
the kind of demon that takes you sleeping.

 

5

With all my strength I pushed her away.
She hit a rock and was stunned for a moment,
then, smiling as blissful as a convent nun,
she took up the swaddled infant and left me.
I was sitting stock upright. My lip bled;
I tasted my own blood on the back of my hand.

How much time passed, I cannot tell.
Perhaps her spell was still upon me.
A thousand times I have regretted this —
that I did not rise, and follow, and kill her.
My knees did not quite work. The tree
that lay upon me blocked my way,
but did not stop her from moving on.

There is a dream that every dreamer knows,
where one foot goes in front of another,
yet nothing changes. I know I stood.
I know I freed myself from branch and root.
I found my rifle and I re-loaded it. I moved
to where the other soldier had fallen.

One step. Another. She got there first.
One step, And then another. Dawn came
before I had moved a meter. I dragged
my right leg forward, leaned to run,
but I ran not. The succubus was on him.

“Push her away!” I screamed. She laughed.
She rode him. His eyes had never opened.
Their bodies undulated, backs arched,
their loins entangled. I raised my rifle.
I thought she ducked, but what she did
instead was to lean down — o monstrous kiss! —
only to come back up with mouth engored.
Torn flesh hung down her chin, then vanished.

How long it would go on, how many times
they’d rise and fall, Hell’s carousel, until
he would expire, a screaming skull,
and she would move on to — another?

My finger tensed the trigger. I feared
she would be gone before I pulled it.
Then what should happen, by God’s will,
was that none other than Captain McGregor
came up behind her, his bayonet
in one great thrust impaling her.
Clear off the ground he lifted her.
Still I can hear that loathsome wet sound
as she was pulled away from her unconscious victim,
how she expired with one sick gurgling gasp.
No brimstone, no fairy light, no utterance.
She was just as dead as any dead thing here.

 

6

I was not fit for battle again, they said.
The experience had quite unhinged me.
McGregor, by letter and telegram,
told me the results of the “Inquiry.”
“The work of an escaped madwoman”
was the official conclusion.

These facts I know. The medics took her.
A full autopsy was conducted.
McGregor himself presided.
“Open her belly,” he told the doctor.
Out poured the scraps of human visage:
cheeks, noses, ears, lips and mustaches.

“Open her bowels,” McGregor demanded.
It was human flesh all the way down.
She had gorged herself for days, it seemed.

As for the “infant,” that pile of old rags
was but a doll-head and windings, from which
unraveled, came forth a great heap of things:
name tags and coins and keepsakes,
buttons and watches, lockets and compasses.

“How many, then?” I asked McGregor.
“I could not count them,” was all he told me.
McGregor was dead soon after. And Sorley,
he had vanished in the battle at Loos.
They found his last sonnet in camp,
where he had put those very words
“When you see millions of the mouthless dead.”

You’ll not forget this tale, I take it.
Your mind may blot it out, just as I go
and re-confess it each week at St. James',
and the old priest just plumb forgets he heard it.
I don’t know which is worse: to have no face,
or to have a story that no one wants to hear.