A Cry from Afar

 

April 1871. The Paris Commune has seized power in Paris and is arming the city against the regular French government in Versailles. Paris feels itself betrayed, for while it never surrendered to the Prussians, the new government signed a shameful armistice and royalists will almost certainly be back in power with all their reactionary repressions. While the Prussian Army occupied Paris for only a single day and departed without looting or destruction, Paris is now in a state of civil war. The Commune demands that all able-bodied men enlist in the coming struggle between the national government and the city of Paris. The French are now fighting one another. Hugo publishes this poem in the newspaper Le Rappel, protesting the coming horrors.

IV
A CRY FROM AFAR
by Brett Rutherford
Adapted and translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”

Just where is all this taking us?
As this great country crumbles
at every step they take,
can they not feel it happening?
Someone needs punishing —
why punish all of Paris?
The city just wants to be free.
The world hangs in the balance
and Paris is on the scale,
a trembling equilibrium.
We have become the abyss
in which the future broods.

Have we not hurled enough
into the Ocean already?
The bottom of the sea
cannot be punished more
than Europe, which suffers blows
with France at its heart.

Insane combatants,
what do you want?
Set fire to the wheat that feeds you,
cut down with bayonets
the figures of Honor, Reason, Hope!
What have we come to? Enemies
on both sides uttering
the sacred name of France!
Stop it! Each step you take
leaves only weeping in its wake.

French cannons fire
against French targets.
Obeying the command to attack,
you sow death ahead of you
and reap shame behind.
After the double blows of September
and February (defeat
and a dishonored armistice),
we no long know who we are.
We pour out and mix on the paving-stones
the blood of peasants
the blood of workers;
it runs through the streets like rain
cascades from roof and culvert —
even the fountains run red!
It is as incomprehensible to me
as if the Latins turned on Rome
or the Greeks sacked Athens.

In whose name, I dare to ask,
does this slaughter continue?
The priest who says God wants this, lies.
You seem to fight whichever way
the wind is turning. How is this?
No lucid moments guide you,
or give you pause to take account.
For killing your own brother
you find yourself a hero.

Horror! Abasement, blame,
the affronts against humanity
darken the sky and shadow your brows.
What you mistake for a flag,
shroud-black, shroud-white, up there
above your temple of triumph:
Look again! It is only a rag
hung over the bone-yard ossuary.
Amid your downfall, regard it
carefully, the flag of mourning,
the emblem of Prussia.
This insolent cloth has wrapped around you,
and made you its mummy.
You cannot make it out
as it darkly enfolds you,
like Egypt lording it over the Hebrews,
heavy and sinister, a dark glory.
It has come to your house. It reigns.
Civil war, sad once after Austerlitz,
and now, after Sedan’s defeat, so vile!

What hideous adventure,
gambling your own homeland
and its future with a roll of dice.
Have you gone made, to pitch a tent
on your own ramparts, to fight again,
O Paris, you wounded lion
with a bloody spear still in your side.
Warriors with unhealed wounds,
you sally forth to bruise and tear
the stitches from one another.

In that woman darkly bleeding
in the doorway you march on by,
do you not see your own mother?
That widow and child without support,
those workers fainting for lack of bread,
the sum and yield of all the terrible
conditions of war: what are they
to you, the ever-more implacable
rhetorician, soldier, and self-styled Tribune?
You repair nothing,
and make all things the worse.
Where a beacon is needed,
you dig an abyss.
From both sides the same despicable
fanfare sounds, the cry from afar
comes in one common tongue:
come, War — come, Death.
Whose death is demanded?
The answer: Cain.
That some who bowed before Prussia
now turn a haughty face to France,

the deep skies look down in shame.
I call disgrace and infamy upon
the kind of man, whoever they may be,
who safely sit in shadows, on murder’s
bulwark, rising themselves on pedestals
atop the public’s misfortune, whose puffed
cheeks blow out a universal contagion,
imposing a fatal duel on the indignant
people, on the servile rank-and-file,
lighting the hot brands of civil war. Disgrace
on those who put the undying city
in prison yet again (as if starvation
had not been enough!), trampling all rights,
France self-assassinating its own spirit,
Paris dead, its star gone out from the heavens.
And who would be so base as not to shudder
as the real enemy’s laughter bursts out around us?

The Secrets of Life and Death

 by Brett Rutherford

That hothouse summer our science club,
armed with black powder and chemistry sets,
determined to plump the depth of nature.
Our rocket had failed to launch; the pipe
we used to test it turned cannon and blew
a small hole in Caruso’s garage. Some fluid
we made at random promised a Nobel prize
when we found it could eat through concrete,
but we failed to make it a second time.
Heads full of science-fiction visions,
we knew that alien blobs throbbed
and ate flesh, that evil brains from space
could replace those of our parents and teachers,
that tendril and tentacle could spring
out of a test-tube or a cracked meteor.

I had everything at hand. Once I had seen
a clay-man Golem rise out of hillside;
had held in my hand a still-hot meteor
that on my desk, unsplit, promised
something unknown to the Periodic Table;
once a dead cat had tasted lightning,
too soon, too fast, and charred to ash
in our hill-top eyrie laboratory; once I
had read Faust and found a stone,
egg-shaped, and in my hand,
as assured as a magician’s wand,
I felt ready in my eleven years
to master the secrets of life and death.

We came close with the Boron Monster.
We watched in quiet horror as on
the microscope slides the compound
of boric acid and other substances frothed up,
bubbled, and died away, leaving behind
the very image of cell walls. If carbon
was the root of life, then why not Boron?
The slides we took to school sure fooled
the earnest science teachers. “Alive!”
he said, “or recently alive, anyway!”
Some shied away from making more
of the pasty-white Boron blob. “What if
it got inside you?” Dave withered to ask.
“What if it started replacing your parts
with more of itself? What if it wants
to eat everything it comes upon?”

That night the Boron Monster went up
and over the edge of the basement counter.
Its white trail led to the drain-hole.
We watched. We listened. Three boys
all swore they heard it gurgling
between their houses’ drainpipes,
but then it oozed away to nothing,
another rainbow slurry in Jacob’s Creek.
None of us mentioned it again.

And then, one day, I found the Book
as Tim and I explored the unallowed
corners of my parents’ bedroom.
Far back beneath the bed it lay,
with tattered and yellowed edges.
At first glance, nothing. All it said
was “Marriage Manual.” Opened,
it reveal the coiled horrors of anatomy.

Tim recoiled and shut the book.
“Some kind of sick science fiction,”
he hazarded. I grabbed it, opened it again.
The sight of giant penis, cross-sectioned
and labeled like a butcher’s chop-guide,
was bad enough, but there as well,
the stuff inside a woman’s body,
unthinkable! What could it all be for?

Near as I could tell, it had something to do
with babies and where they came from,
a subject I had never given a second thought,
except that, somehow, women became elephant-
sized, gave birth, and then returned
to their normal proportions. As we read,
and studied, and said out loud, the words,
it dawned on us that this was worse
than anything the Boron monster might do.

Somehow these alien beings escaped
from human bodies and fumbled about
in the beddings and on the forest floors
like dark and obscene funguses. Off went
the errant spermatozoa in one direction,
while ovaries unfertilized rolled off another,
like unshelled eggs a chicken had kicked aside.

I shuddered. They could be all around us,
hiding in blankets and dresser drawers,
curled up like spiders in the bath-tub,
waiting to plant themselves in anyone
foolish enough to lie still long enough.

One picture that showed a man
somehow atop a woman
made no sense at all to us.
We slammed the book shut.
I put it between Superman comics
and War of the Worlds for further study.

That night we sat
on DeSantis’s porch, all eyes
again on the Marriage Manual.
Young Albert explained the mechanics
of copulation. “No way!” we screamed,
hands crossed in horror before our eyes.
“That’s horrible,” Dave said.
“I will never do that to a woman.”

On our third perusal
of the forbidden book,
Tim came back in triumph.
“It’s not true! I asked my mother.
Babies are not made that way.
Men want to do all kinds of things
when they get alone with women.
She says she spends half the night
just fighting my father off, and now
she’s more than ready for a divorce.”

“Then where do babies come from?”

“She says when a woman wants a baby,
she goes to the family doctor
and he takes care of it.”

That seemed to settle the matter.
We could sleep soundly knowing
that clay gives rise to Golems,
that Boron monsters slough off
white powder like mummy skin,
and lonely spermatozoa search
for lost eggs in the treetops.

 

The Invisible Man

by Brett Rutherford

On every Wednesday night,
as my father played jazz somewhere
and mother puttered about
on dishes and ironing, I sat
transfixed before Shock Theater,

as on the tiny black-and-white
flicker-and-flash TV, monsters
paraded one after another.
First it was Frankenstein,
Bride of, Son of, Ghost of,
Dracula and his son and daughter,
werewolves of London, wolfman
in the shadowy peaks of Wales,
all mixed and regenerated
by a succession of mad scientists.

I watched. All my friends watched.
We talked of nothing else
in the sunblasted schoolyard
where we hid from the play-ball bullies.

Next up was The Invisible Man,
but something was odd
in the kitchen behind me.
No dishes clanged; no steam
rilled out from the electric iron.
She paced, she paced, she looked
at the clock as though it perched
to fall from its nail to the floor.

For days I had heard
from the cinder-block corner
my mother’s voice, and a man’s.
Son or nephew of the Carusos,
he hung around the garage beneath
our dingy apartment, watched as
my father packed up his clarinet
and drove off to the night clubs
for his dance-band gigs. “Not man
enough for a woman like you,”
the suave Italian told my mother.
“I hate him,” she said — “He don’t
weigh but a hundred pounds I’d guess.”
“You need to find out
     what a real man is like.”

A long pause. No slap, not even
a “no thank you.” “A real shame.
A woman like you needs to know
what it’s like to really live.”
Another silence.
Something touches something,
breath held in. “Tonight,” he said,
“While he’s out playing his stupid clarinet.”

“No Shock Theater tonight!”
Her hand turns off the TV.
“What? But it’s The Invisible Man!”
“It will only upset you. You’re going to bed
early.” So fast my head could spin,
I am whisked to my room and tucked in.

“I am closing this door.
One peep out of you,
     then no more Shock Theater ever.”

Stunned and angry I lay in the dark.
The front door opened and closed.
Just as if The Invisible Man had entered.
Naked, he could be anywhere at all.
My parents’ bedroom door went shut.
Soom something invisible began to shake
the wall and rattle the window glass.

Then, silence. Then slumber.
At school, I sat in silence
as my friends related the marvel
of the Invisible Man’s unraveling
from bandages to naked transparency.

I could have told them
he had been at our house,
and how my mother found out at last
what a real man was like,
even if no one could see him.

 

 

Terrible Weather

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     Translated from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871”

 

Terrible weather! In this dreary space
where the unforeseen arises,
     and the unexpected wants to come to pass,
my thoughts are a meadow
     given over to random invasions.

 

News reaches me, one fact after another;
blacker they get, and greater in enormity.
Day after day as I write this book,
the clock dictates new miseries
as the minute-hand rises and flees in terror.

Hours, mornings, noon, twilight and night,
how many? The numbered weeks of this Terrible Year
are like so many hydras that Hell creates
in order to fill its own abysses, bottomless.

 

Word of the last calamity wheels over me and passes on;
its claw on my soul, it rolls its fiery eyes,
leaving in my crumpled lines, sad, harsh, and bruised,
the track that one sees when a monster has passed.

 

If you could truly see into my shadowed mind,
you would find it marred with the countless imprints
of all these days of horror, and anger and bored inaction.
I look as if lions had walked all over me.

 

There Was a Woman, Wild in the Woods

 

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “April 1871.”

 

There was a woman, wild with grief, and she was everywhere!

In the untrod forests, whose thickets none can penetrate,
she gave the owls asylum. Softly the worried leaves
whispered into her harried ears, of evil afoot and dark designs.
At her breast the sweet newborn shivered; she swaddled it
and hurried on, for terror must not catch this tragic child.

She knew paths where no paths were visible; branches
parted for her before the growing night,
the sky’s dark tide, the baying threat of the wolf-pack.

Oh! the fierce love of the woman of the forest!

 

Such now is Paris, the mixing-pot of Europe,
Glory, Law, and Art her triple breasts
that feed her celestial child, the Future.
Silver-shod Dawn champs at the bit
in neighing salute around the cradle sublime.
She, once a Chimera, is now
the august mother of our reality,
nurse of the high-flown thinkers’ dreams,
an equal sister to Rome and Athens.
As sure as spring bursts out with laughter,
as sure as the sky that never fails to glow,
Paris is life itself, Paris the joy of living.

 

She is the wild woman still, where once
the woods stood thick. Now she is Paris,
and mother of all Europe, with three breasts
breastfeeds the Future, her celestial child
with the mother-milk of Law, Glory and Art.

At dawn the distant horses neigh
around this cradle sublime …

When the air is pure in the light of day
beneath an unclouded blue firmament,
she rocks and sings to the mighty little god.

 

Each day a festival! She nods to show
to proud and cheerful citizens this dream —
the world to be that, breathless, stutters,
this trembling imago of the new human race,
this giant (no taller than a dwarf today!)
which we dare to call Tomorrow, for whom
a furrow already forms ahead of his path.
Mother Ideal! On her calm and tender forehead
her happy mouth, and in her gaze that fixes you,
evil is denied existence in that radiant smile.

We sense that in this city, hope lives on,
a place that loves and blesses us. But if
a sudden darkness should come upon us,
if the dreaded eclipse comes to swallow us
and intends to shadow us forever;
if panic makes the people shiver, embers die;
if some vague monster tramps about
the horizon line of forts and forests;
if everything that slithers and extrudes itself,
crawling and squinting from some nether chaos,
comes to threaten to divine child, our Future;

oh, then, she is fierce. She stands, she screams,
she becomes the furious Paris. She rumbles and roars,
fierce as any monster, known or unknown.

She stands up, and she who once charmed
the whole known world, will make it shudder!