Brett Rutherford

BRETT RUTHERFORD. CRACKERS AT MIDNIGHT: NEW POEMS AND REVISIONS 2015-2017.

This book’s title-poem — a small recollection of a hungry boy meeting his grandmother for a secret feast of saltine crackers and butter — is a metaphor for the book itself: a feast of poetic narratives and visions that the reader can savor, indulging in “just one more” until the last page is turned. Two story-poems come from the Pennsylvania landscape: the tale of Pittsburgh’s radioactive millionaire who haunts Allegheny Cemetery, and the childhood memory of a visiting Rabbi who makes a Golem-monster in rural Scottdale. The feast, however, also spans continents and era, as the poet takes us to the grave of Leonardo da Vinci in France, the exhumation of Goethe’s body in Weimar, a flamingo sacrifice by the Emperor Nero, ancient Alexandrian gossip about ibises, and a shattering visit to the home of Emily Dickinson in Amherst. Sometimes the poems inhabit a strange, visionary world, overhearing a prayer on Cyprus from a hunted archbishop, visioning Eldorado rising from a glacial lake, or penetrating the psychology of the Egyptian Pharaoh Snofru. A cluster of nature poems from Edinboro Lake in Northwestern Pennsylvania, and some melancholy contemplations on “The Loved Dead,” round out this collection of 40 poems.

THE DRESSER IN EMILY’S BEDROOM

Right there, feet from the bed she died in,
were the poems, sewn up in tiny fascicle bundles,
unread, not to be read, not to be published,
monoprint chapbooks arranged and rearranged
to suit intended readers
she was too reticent to address,
ever, except from behind a door, ajar.
They came from there, her writing table
(no bigger than a oiuja board),
from planchette pen to folded leaf
stitched shut and mummy-wrapped,
living and smothering just feet from where
a gasp and pen-dab and a foot-tap
telegraphed them into being.
How many enwrapped, entombed inside
that oblong, moth-proof drawer?
how many survivors of admonition
a poet should never ... a lady does not?

Eighteen hundred tightly-wound mortars
she wryly called her “little hymns”
huddled like captives in a slave-hold,
sea-echoes lost in suffocated nautilus,
an unlit library with no borrowers —
how many silent nights did she browse there,
and turn the pages, and close them,
and push the drawer shut?

Emily Dickinson at Amherst,
I in your room as close to fainting
as ever in my adult existence,
at tear-burst, with a strangled cry I dare
not utter. A life, a life’s work,
a soul's compression that one executor
could have tossed away for kindling,
or suppressed for jealousy or malice.
But we have you, Emily, we have you always,
your words in a fascicle of stitched stars.

*** ***

DREAMERS

The hand extended to an innocent child,
the hand snapped back; the slap
back-handed, the raised club,
the road-side stop, the knock
three times at the midnight door.
Dark-celled without a lawyer,
then bused to a border, and over it.
One hand, with a pen-stroke
(small fingers tweeting), eight
hundred thousand eye-blink exiles.
What list are you on, reader,
and when does your time come?

*** ***

From THE LOVED DEAD

1
Another year,
the sun resembles itself
but does not fool the trees
who shun its cool imposture.
Buds open reluctantly,
their slanted eyes askew
with annual doubts.
It is never the same,
each lap of light a ghost
of former springs, each ray
a waning monument
from where a darkling star
gluts space
with ever-diminishing mass.
The year we met,
is the immemorial year, the year
that cannot be repeated.

What world is this,
in which you do not wake,
and sleep, and call me?
The universe forgets itself —
the idiot sun implodes
into a fathomless mouth,
both feaster and food
adjourning to nothingness
at the event horizon.

The earth spins blindly on.
First, love can die.
And then the loved
becomes the loved dead.
What if, in world-wipe,
you never existed?

Paperback edition, 126 pages, 6 x 9 inches, illustrated. The 236th publication of The Poet's Press. Published March 2018. ISBN 978-0922558957. $12.95. CLICK HERE to order paperback from Amazon.

Hardcover edition, 126 pages, 6 x 9 inches, illustrated. The 236th publication of The Poet's Press. Published December 2021. ISBN 979-8785903937. $15.95. CLICK HERE to order hardcover from Amazon.

Also available as a PDF e-book from Payhip. CLICK HERE to order the PDF ebook.

Version 24. Updated February 24, 2024