From Hecla to Jacob's Creek

 

BRETT RUTHERFORD’S
FROM HECLA TO JACOB’S CREEK

American neo-Romantic poet Brett Rutherford spent his first thirteen years in the coal and coke districts of southwestern Pennsylvania. The Rutherfords had emigrated from Northumberland in England to Scottdale around 1880, and took part in its mill-town boom as business owners, financiers, and shop owners. After the Depression destroyed the town’s fortunes, the family remained, a pinch-penny aristocracy. The other side of his family dwells “out home,” where Alsatian maternal grandparents lived in squalor in a tar-paper-covered shack. These country people, their pride and their secrets, left an indelible impression that emerges in this book.

In addition to coke ovens, coal mines, and decrepit houses, the poet’s early childhood is also blasted by the specter of “Dr. Jones,” who, his mother assures him, can be summoned with a phone call, to employ his amputation saws on the limbs of any disobedient child. Connected to this is the threat of “Torrance,” the state mental hospital where several aunts and uncles had been sent, where ordinary mental patients were confined with the criminally insane. The two poems recovering memories of this psychological horror are a jarring specimen of childhood trauma.

This is a book of secrets. A grandmother reveals her Native American origins. An imaginary playmate turns out to be real. A pact is made to help a visiting Rabbi make a Golem. Small boys wrestle with the discovery of a sex manual. A neighbor woman freezes to death in a cold wave. A hesitant girl on the library steps never manages to cross its threshold. After a divorce scandal, the town pulls a blanket of silence and shunning, and a family name is erased from history.

This memoir in poems portrays a true “outsider,” already reading adult literature from the age of six, finding his own way out of a brutal and forbidding landscape.

This is the 316th publication of The Poet’s Press. Published July 2024. Epub and Kindle $1.99. Order from Amazon at https://amzn.to/3WoHuVA.

At Lincoln Center

by Brett Rutherford

As if she knew it,
lost it and found
it again after
oh how many wars,
so many
obituaries read,

she, a bent old
squint-faced in
recognition
pink-coat woman
leaned dangerously,
picked up
with hand nearly as brittle,
the first brown leaf.

"Got you!"
she seemed to say.
She tucked it away
into her wrinkled
Macy's bag, then

giving the slant sun
a tsk-tsk, she
vanished before
I could blink to be sure
I had really seen her,
bag lady, hag
of the fountain,
nixie
of Lincoln Center's
high notes, horn-calls
and pas de deux.

Weehawken Cinderella

by Brett Rutherford

Home by midnight!
A girl can become
a fairy-tale princess
in Brooklyn or Queens.
Even the Bronx
is not out of the question.
The trains run forever,
expressways late night
are not so bad.

Home by midnight!
Forget it, New Jersey!
Hoboken’s waterfront,
heights all the way up
to far Fort Lee — no way
to the ball and back!
Weehawken Cinderella
must pumpkin-float
her outboard regatta
of rowing mice.

Home by midnight?
She didn’t make it.
The slattern sisters take no excuse.
The pumpkin rots in the gutter;
The rodent rowing team has vanished.
(The cat spits bones, and preens
itself in glutton bliss.)

Back to her ashcan
servitude, our heroine,
on the West Side’s wrong side,
mops floors and weeps
with soap-surf teleplays,
forgetting the prince,
the ballroom flatteries,
the one-shoe-off diplomacy,
the sudden dash for door
at bell toll--

No prince would dream
of crossing that river to find her.
Godmother or no, that's how
it ends, all but invisible;
she dies a virgin
on the Hudson Palisades.

 

 

A Night in Brussels

A mob attacks Victor Hugo's home in Brussels.

 

by Brett Rutherford
Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, May 1871.

 

It’s the little things
     that get to you.
Here at my house,
someone came to kill me
     yesterday. Imagine that!
What offended the locals
is that I said I believe
     in offering asylum.
An indiscriminate crowd
(a band of imbeciles, really!)
rushed onto my property at night.
They made so much noise
     the trees in the square
     were shivering with fright,
but not one neighbor
     came to a window to look.
Our climb to the upper floor,
      for one of my age,
was long, and arduous, and horrible.
     And little Jeanne was ill.

Here we concealed ourselves,
four women, my two grand-children,
and, out of breath, yours truly.
I admit I was afraid for the little one.
Just us, to garrison the fortress!
This was a dark fairy-tale: nothing
whatever appeared to help us,
as, by some magic, police
within ear-shot were rendered deaf,
and the records would say,
“They had business elsewhere,”
a rat-scare, or someone’s cat
that tumbled down a garden well.
A hard, sharp stone hit Jeanne. She cried.
In this cab-man’s night attack
they acted like medieval warriors
before some Black Forest stronghold.
They shouted: “You! Bring a ladder!
Go find a beam we can use! Victory!”

 

Amid the fracas, no one heard our cries.
They wanted to get it over by dawn,
so no one would see their faces.
The banging stopped, then started again.
They were screaming breathlessly.
Two men brought back from the Pacheco quarter
a beam some scaffolding surrendered,
but after some clumsy battering,
they knew it had arrived too late.

So, they stood there screaming, “Assassin!”
(Is this what you get for being a poet?)
“We want you dead, you brigand!
Bandit! The noose is too good for you!”
This chanting and shouting went on forever.

We waited in silence.

The little boy took hold of his sister’s hand,
to calm her. Outside, the black tumult
continued. The voices were not even human.
When I moved across the room
     to comfort the women
     who murmured prayers together,
someone made out my shadow
and the window was smashed with stones.
The only thing they didn’t do
     was call out Long live the Emperor!
(Was my old nemesis behind this?)
The sturdy door below seemed made
to mock the beating it took,
and that was what preserved us.

 

There must have been fifty outside,
     courage in numbers,
and from them my name
kept echoing in clamors of rage.
Bring him down to the light!
Take him with torch and lantern!
To his death! To his death!
     Let him perish! We need this!

 

The violation came in waves,
     attack, withdrawal,
a collective in-take of breath,
and then, with a mutual shout,
they were at it again. And then,
in the distance, there sang
a solitary nightingale.

 

Brussels, May 29, 1871

 

Is It Night? Is It Day?

The Army of Versailles re-enters Paris to fight the Paris Commune, May 21, 1871.

 

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “May 1871”

The horror comes at twilight,
neither day nor night.
All pale and neutral shades give way
to an immensity of anger.
Thunderbolts flash, but after them
comes only a muffled rumbling.
Pale and shivering, we attend.
Some gesture meant to torture us
gropes imbecilicly in glancing blows.
No steeple or crucifix stand out,
and nothing human flies or floats.
The odds of surviving
in this field of carnage
are slim, where people
already vanquished line up
to be machine-gunned,
clueless as to why, as what
some claimed a duty
was, to others, crime.

Up, up, the shadow ascends
to the peak of Babel’s tower.
Bandits held sixty-four hostages
and killed them; the other side
responds by ordering
six thousand prisoners to die.
He who weeps first,
should the last to mock
another’s misfortune.
Conscience always was, at best,
a dim night-light; this wind
seems to have extinguished it.
O night of blinding haze!
Hour of our peril!

Exterminators, well-dressed
and speaking softly,
make fury pleasing to the palette,
and someone who pleads, “Forgive!”
is made the monster.

It is the Army against the People.
Look, it is only France that bleeds.
Ignorance pitted against
ignorance never wins peace.
The law has fallen on its face.
The last one standing
is always Cain.
Like sooted snow, crime hovers
over everything,
and cannot be brushed away.
The innocent are blackened
as this shadow covers them.
One is sent off to set fire
to Louvre?
“Huh? What is the Louvre?”
He has no idea. Another,
off to horrible exploits,
races ahead of him stupidly.
Where are the laws?

The shadow realm sweeps over Paris,
with flames as its somber progeny,
a greedy sisterhood consuming wood and brick.
Hearts, burned and suffocated, ceased
to beat; souls, not seeing light
to flee to, snuffled out dismally.
One kill with blinded eyes.
Another, knowing nothing, dies.
All perish in one mélange of misery:
the blond child, the terrified slave
chained to his place in the galley,
fathers along with sons, young and old,
the sword that felled the reprobate
cuts down a figure running, a nun.
Death cuts with the same indifferent swath
the philosophic dreamer,
along with the drunk in the gutter.
Into a common abyss they all expire.
In the terrifying inferno we seem to hear
a single voice bellowing, a brazen ox,
but whose voices are compounded there
to make a single scream indicting chaos?