| |
A cycle of poems by BRETT RUTHERFORD celebrating the poetic, frightening, erotic and transcendental, all set in the gardens of the dead. These poems are part of the large collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems. |
The Turk's Mausoleum (Mt. Auburn,
Mass)
Night Walker (Western Pennsylvania)
Night Shift(Western Pennsylvania)
Trysting Place(Edinboro, Pennsylvania)
Midsummer Night (Edinboro,
Pennsylvania)
West Point (West Point Military
Academy, NY)
The Forgotten Gravestone (Providence,
Rhode Island)
The Swan Point Ghoul (Providence,
Rhode Island)
Hart Island (Hart
Island, New York)
After the Storm (Edinboro,
Pennsylvania)/
A Turkish rug merchant's mausoleum:
hung with a brilliant
tapestry,
sunlit from door glass
showroom bright.
His favorite Bokhara?
His last request
to keep it from Omar,
his rival, or Habib,
the brother he hated?
Or a ghoulish invite
to grave robbers?
Once in, they have to hear
his well-oiled patter,
hours of rug talk,
gossip about the Iranians,
complaints about the
cheap carpets from China
that will be the death of him —
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Before a cenotaph
in civilized Mt. Auburn,
a desiccated squirrel,
its eyes a maggot nest,
its scream frozen —
someone tore out his heart
and made him an offering
on steps of the monument,
legs extended in a cross,
his vacant rib cage
crying "Murder!"
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Still in her nightgown
the wiry old woman,
nearly a skeleton in satin,
sleepwalks through lawns,
onto a well-known path
passing her mother's grave,
barefoot between the Civil War cannons,
down the slope to the river.
The cold chill current
lifts her up from her wading.
Weeds and crayfish
merge with her streaming hair.
She sinks, her gown
a luminescent ribbon.
Her life dissolves
in unseen bubbles.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
At two in the morning
they pry the door
of an ancient crypt.
Their truck idles, they grunt
as the crowbar twists
the iron of a rusted lock.
They push aside
a stone sarcophagus lid,
drag something heavy
along the floor,
lift it into the pickup,
cover it with tarp.
The truck pulls out,
its headlights doused.
The three men share a bottle,
light one another's cigarettes,
wipe their hands on their
red plaid hunting jackets.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
In August heat
the fraternity boy
slips out of his bathing suit,
slides into the warmth
of the eager girlfriend.
They lay on a pioneer grave,
the lap of lake water
matches their rhythm.
He reads the stones
whispers inscriptions like names
of other women, better lovers:
Jeanette...Sarah...Abigail.
The carpet of grass
seems to undulate.
The lake pulls back its waves,
the sky careens
above the maples.
He feels a host of faces
crowding inside him,
their compound anima
a cauldron of passions.
A spinster clicks tongue
in withered cheeks.
An ectoplasmic virgin
blushes.
A headless bosom
smothers him.
Another's tree-root hunger
says Love me!
He stands--he screams--
his seed arcs out,
a liquid aurora,
dappling the grass
in its fall.
They dress and run
from the peeping ghosts,
from the knowing grass,
the listening night.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Bats line the graveyard trees,
hanging from pine and maple boughs.
Not hundreds but thousands of them--
Their slant inverted eyes regard me.
In their world I'm the strange one,
a two-leg walker
stuck to the ground,
dim-sighted, inarticulate,
deaf to ultrasonic subtleties.
I love their wingbeats, their
startled flight when I clap my hands--
their comradeship for my monologues,
their brotherly listening--
And though they darken the trees
so the beacon moon,
the stars cannot intrude
fireflies assemble
like landing lights,
my pathway clearly marked
into the grove and the elder stones
out to the lake and the quiet streets
or-to nowhere
I can remain as their August king,
regent of their passing luminance,
crowned in an aureole of fireflies
for a night that never bows to dawn.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
At West Point Cemetery
I come upon the grave,
the mass grave of cadets
who went half-trained
to a Mexican slaughter.
They lie in their shrouds,
their dress blues,
buttons polished,
shoes immaculate;
laid gently like babes
in a playpen
side by side in a chaste
embrace,
stacked up like logs
for the burning,
smothered with loam and tears.
This ground is covered
with yellow wood sorrel
the clover-like leaves for Luck
the frail blond flowers for Beauty
the persistent roots for Strength
I tear a stalk and taste
its lemon flavor,
chewing it slowly--
not some pasty communion wafer
but a Host sublimed of flesh,
of hair and bone and marrow;
not some dark wine fermented
by yeast in Original Sin,
but dew and rain and root-sap
drunk from the lips of the grave.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
At Salem
the burying ground
is a garden of stones,
an orchard of oaks.
Acorns burst to grow,
tombstones erase
their shallow tattoos,
becoming anonymous--
Death's heads
and angel wings,
bad poems
consumed by moss,
the promise of Heaven
like Confederate money.
Still there is some
justice--an oak trunk
engulfs the stone
of a solemn Puritan,
roots clinging like
rabid dogs.
He doomed the innocent
as witches and wizards,
to infamy and hanging,
to a farmyard burial
in family shame.
Imagine this--
his grave invaded
by inexorable roots,
the frail box split,
his gradual awakening
as vampire tendrils
invade his ears,
his mouth, his nostrils,
the circling of taproot
to snap his neck,
his arms and legs
broken and useless.
Doomed to immortal
consciousness
(the Life Eternal!),
nerves and ganglia
a web of pain receptors/
An old woman
condemned him to this.
She spoke the words
on a Candlemas midnight,
took from the hanging tree
where her mother's mother
died innocent,
the patient acorn of revenge.
She wrote his name on it,
pushed it with thumb
into the loam of his grave,
traced runes in blood
upon his stone,
danced the wild dance
of his resurrection
sang things that the wizened
old ladies of Salem never knew
as there were no witches
in Salem
then.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
At Swan Point:
a level stone is engulfed
by soil and grass.
It settled, perhaps,
or a careless groundsman
neglected it.
Most of the name is gone,
and half the date.
Earth closes around it
like a healing wound.
There must be no family left,
no friends to make worried
inquiries at the cemetery office.
Perhaps he lived abroad,
fought an unpopular war,
was disinherited,
suffered excommunication,
the village homosexual,
married a foreigner,
died in a prison,
drooling lobotomized
in a madhouse,
morphined in an alley
or perhaps, he was a poet.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Two months have passed
since I stood here,
in magic circle at the Old Gent's
grave, honoring Lovecraft.
The place I chose to stand on--
an older plot by a pine tree--
has dropped by a foot or more,
its earth a moil of root-turn,
brown against green
of surrounding sod.
Did the coffin collapse,
or was it removed
by something
that tunnels
beneath the gravebeds?--
some necrophagic mole-man,
sharp claws on spatulate fingers,
red eyes sheathed in reptile layerings,
teeth jagged and piercing,
its sense of smell infallible,
burrowing from vault to tomb,
to late night lap of pond water,
to daylong sleep in a bat cave.
Even as we stood here,
speaking our words of praise,
reading our innocent poems,
did March earth muffle
the splinter of casket
the tear of cloth,
the insistent feeding
of the Swan Point ghoul?
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ferry cuts fog
in Long Island Sound,
baleful horn bellowing
a midnight run
unblessed by harbor lights,
unknown to sleeping millions
convicts at the rails,
guards behind them,
dour-faced captain at the helm
a face and a pipe
and a dead-ahead glare,
an empty gaze that asks no questions
offers no advice
A careful mooring,
cables thicker than hanging noose
bind ship to pier;
pilings like pagan columns
bind pier to Hart Island
Convicts shuffle to the end of the dock,
guards behind them with billy clubs
hands tensed at holster.
You fellas better behave now,
the captain mutters,
just do what you're told.
And no funny business, another voice warns,
'cause anything could happen to you here.
The prisoners shiver at moonless expanse
of blackened water,
dead shell of Bronx one way,
bedrooms of Queens the other;
clap their hands,
blow on their fingers
to fight the chill.
Guess you would freeze, one speculates
before you could swim to shore.
Just do what you're told,
the biggest con admonishes.
I been here before. Do what
you're told and then it's over.
Eager to earn
the early release,
willing to dig
and lift and carry,
they turn to the foreman.
He points to the tarp
that covers the cargo.
They lift the tiny oblong boxes,
frail as balsa
thin pine confining
the swaddled contents.
What's in these things?
one asks, taking on three
stacked to his chin.
Over there, is all the foreman says,
pointing to mounds
where a silent back hoe
stands
sentinel.
These be coffins, the older con explains.
Baby coffins.
They lower the boxes
into the waiting holes,
read the tags attached to them:
BABY BOY FRANKLIN
CARL HERNANDEZ
UNKNOWN BABY GIRL, HISPANIC.
The adult coffins are heavier,
two men at least to carry each one.
They can joke about these:
Heavy bastard, this Jose.
Carla here, she musta wasted away.
But no one speaks about the babies.
The convicts' eyes grow angry, then sad.
Later the mounds will be toppled,
the soil returned to the holes,
flattened and tamped
with a cursory blessing
by an ecumenical chaplain.
These are the lonely dead,
the snuffout of innocence:
crack babies
AIDS babies
babies dead from drive-by
bullets
babies abandoned like unwanted kittens
dumpster children
No wonder this island cries in its sleep.
GO BACK TO CONTENTS
Dead night. I tramp the midnight lane
of yews and mausoleums.
The air resounds with muffled cries:
a cat? a wailing ghost?
a child abandoned
to gusts of rain and fatal chill?
I think of Roman fathers
exposing their infants on hilltops--
or, far more likely in this
ignoble time, a furtive birth
dumped from the back of a passing car.
My eye expands into the moonless dark.
I brush against the rain-filled leaves,
push through the hedge
until I find the source:
on a mound where six markers neatly grew
a tree had crashed upon an infant's grave.
Sleep, sorry ghost
from your Indian awakening!
Was it not here the Iroquois
made secret pledges to moon and stars?
Did they not tell of jumbled boneyards
where felling trees brought back the dead--
not whole, but with the jaws and tails
of animals, were-things with fangs
and claws and antlers, hoofed hands
and legs attached at useless angles.
Hence their horror of disturbing bones!
Something ascends before me, a blur
between the graveyard and the pines:
I see the outspread wings of an owl,
the twisted arc of its talons,
but it regards me with a human face,
a tiny death-head in a feather shroud,
withered and wise and ravenous
for the mother-milk of the skies.
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
"Two decades ago that scribbler Poe--"
Longfellow smiled and took tea,
"--that jingle writer as Emerson dubbed him,
called us but frogs 'round the Common,
likened our poems to croaking.
Well, he's dead, and I'm writing still,
and that's an end to it."
His auditors nodded, some heavy-eyed,
as the old master recited "Evangeline."
One sunny day, quite unintending,
I find the old bard's tomb in Mt. Auburn:
a grassy knoll well fringed with yews,
a stately monument, the letters
L O N G F E L L O W
immense enough for all to read.
But whom should I discover there,
perversely lingering, casting their shadows
upon the stone that weighs the poet's brow?
Whom but a trio of stately Ravens,
borne on their wings from an unknown shore,
rebutting the greybeard poet's boast,
ending the argument--forevermore!
Go back to TABLE OF CONTENTS
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 and 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.
Copyright 1997 by Brett Rutherford. All Rights Reserved
GO BACK TO THE POET'S PRESS HOME PAGE
