Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

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Elms and maples stand sentry. <strong>The</strong> ground is a riot of toppled tombstones, limbs torn by gale or lightning thrust, fence pickets torn off by age or vandals. <strong>The</strong> winds — or cautious townsmen — have removed the old gray trunk that hoarded the shore like a sentinel (how its unmoving spindle arms alarmed the midnight visitor! how ravens and owls perched there to read the runes of the waveforms, the prophecy of wind and season! how poets and lovers sought it, the artist’s brush absorbed it as silhouette defining the lake beyond!)
I miss that tree. If one of the graves should vanish I would not miss it so much as that withered guardian. It was the life work of a living thing, an epic of cambium in heartwood. Its wisdom was sublimated from soil, drunk from the lake of all waters, tapped from the abundance of sunlight, shielded from frost and lightning fire. It made itself sculpture, transcended its own passing, a defiant singularity, useless, unwanted, beautiful. I shed my clothes to wade in the lake, letting the chill-cold waters accept me, sinking until the rippled plane of water licks at my shoulders, pacing with caution the rubble and sand of the lake-bed. Not for a decade have I touched these waters, communed with the throwaway songs of the bullfrogs, the chirl of crickets, the paper-thin presence of curious insects, the nudge of fishes at my knees, the velvet black flurry and sonar symphony of the bats. Cars hiss by on the distant roadway. House lights blink out. Water goes lull, takes on the hues of blueberries ripening — black and gray and Prussian blue.
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POEMS FROM PROVIDENCE by BRETT RUTH
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CONTENTS AUTUMN POEMS 13 October Is
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184 The McWilliams’ Coffee Table
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POEMS FROM PROVIDENCE
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drifting ghostlike and invisible on
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3 Listen! October is coming! It wil
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THE STATE VERSUS AUTUMN RESOLVED: F
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NOT YEARS ENOUGH How many autumns m
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THE SAILOR AND THE OAK NYMPHS Oak w
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then turning to mockery of his all
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END OF THE WORLD Not with a trumpet
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Stockbrokers adjusted their power t
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THE OUTSIDER Some say that spring i
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oll in this new moon blanket with m
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waiting for the bat, the creeping m
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I waited, I waited — He never arr
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THE ARGUMENT “Two decades ago tha
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AVOIDING THE MUSE Silent this voice
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The clouds make way, open a blue do
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WRITER’S BLOCK For Barbara A. Hol
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This state of things will never do!
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BOARD GAME It is a game that never
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CREATION REVISITED 1 According to U
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But now the horizon rages with whir
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Is it invisible, this imago of Wint
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(the fathers knowingly, in jest, th
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The does take bubble baths. At dusk
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ECLIPSE How like the moon, that sul
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EDGAR AND HELEN Edgar Allan Poe and
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2 Moon and the flames of candled gl
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3 Coffined in his sleepless rooms,
Page 71 and 72: One truck hurtling toward gates lik
Page 73 and 74: These crows are not informers. A sh
Page 75 and 76: eside him, “Comrade, what if I cr
Page 77 and 78: And then he will send them away, do
Page 79 and 80: You have become an allergy, an anti
Page 81 and 82: IVAN GROZNI Ivan Grozni Tyrant of t
Page 83 and 84: Yet who are these ghosts that crowd
Page 85 and 86: dust devil’s playground when all
Page 87 and 88: Winter is honest, at least, the bui
Page 89 and 90: all now are only names in peeling p
Page 91 and 92: PLAGUE It is a plague — an epidem
Page 93 and 94: JUST REWARDS WELCOME TO HEVIN a sig
Page 95 and 96: Stalinists and Maoists, Progressive
Page 97 and 98: THE EVANGELICALS ARE COMING! Who ne
Page 99 and 100: BLUMENSTÜCKE The parlor frowned wi
Page 101 and 102: The combinations were shocking as s
Page 103 and 104: ROADSIDE VIEWS It is the way of tra
Page 105 and 106: RUINS Passing the gutted neighborho
Page 107 and 108: WATER SPRITE Who made you, this ful
Page 109 and 110: It draws us, real and unreal mortal
Page 111 and 112: Time is an endless line wound in a
Page 113 and 114: A shaman sat here, useless for hunt
Page 115 and 116: AT THE COKE OVENS I wanted to see m
Page 117 and 118: I played here as a child, amid the
Page 119 and 120: Moving to field and orchard, Ben na
Page 121: THE CEMETERY BY THE LAKE Edinboro L
Page 125 and 126: You did not know the gourd was holl
Page 127 and 128: who lured me with promises and sea-
Page 129 and 130: In the scant shade of his splintere
Page 131 and 132: It was you who raised the child in
Page 133 and 134: GANYMEDE 1 Night after night the pa
Page 135 and 136: 2 The boy felt the tense of lightni
Page 137 and 138: Beauty too soft for marble, subtle
Page 139 and 140: 5 He summons the troupe of ageless
Page 141 and 142: The boy did not resist, but let his
Page 143 and 144: 8 Ganymede thinks only of Zeus. No
Page 145 and 146: 10 I like to think of the gods stil
Page 147 and 148: THE RANSOM OF GANYMEDE 1 THE TEMPLE
Page 149 and 150: 2 THE SIBYL AT DIDYMOS It is a plac
Page 151 and 152: “What would we shepherds want wit
Page 153 and 154: With this, the Sybil collapses unco
Page 155 and 156: enduring the seismic embrace of her
Page 157 and 158: Yet Hera hesitates. She knows the G
Page 159 and 160: and there, trembling and pale, the
Page 161 and 162: 3 GANYMEDE’S PLEA Ganymede offers
Page 163 and 164: a plaything, upstart and crude. Jea
Page 165 and 166: “It’s really a mercy I turn the
Page 167 and 168: T H I N G S S E E N I N G R A V E Y
Page 169 and 170: 2 SACRIFICE Before a cenotaph in ci
Page 171 and 172: (Silt, fish, flotsam flow from Youg
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4 NIGHT SHIFT At two in the morning
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They watch for a long time, wait fo
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An ectoplasmic virgin blushes, aver
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for this night of nights, summer’
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8 SALEM At Salem the burying ground
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9 THE FORGOTTEN GRAVESTONE At Swan
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THE McWILLIAMS’ COFFEE TABLE So t
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SCENES FROM A MEXICAN VAMPIRE MOVIE
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3 Things go wrong at the American b
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Never knew what hit them or how a b
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Who wrote the note? The blonde on t
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T H U N D E R P U S S: I N M E M O
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We keep our vigil against the time
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yet terrified, into the hands of th
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nothing would daunt your interest i
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I watched you dreaming: the twitch
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7 We became one person, shards of t
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It was not done in a daze. The sun
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A T L O V E C R A F T ’S G R A V
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2 We stand about, a handful swellin
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Earth reels beneath our feet into t
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5 Later a golden moon lifts up, swo
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LOW TIDE “The tide was flowing ou
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Then why should a fireball plummet
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In the stillness of museum night, t
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And there, the steeple on distant F
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prisoners un-decapitated, toxins un
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a literary man, to be sure, a lawye
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“I fear the wine speaks now. Perh
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Here Pabodie would say no more, but
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unquenchable, to fall into her arms
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and flying across the parlor to him
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so that these seeds transcend to se
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HERE AT THE POINT Secret transcript
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Those Lovecraft fans are the worst.
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TO THE ARC OF THE SUBLIME In nights
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We are the scourge of entropy. We s
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ABOUT THE POEMS The following notes
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DEER HUNTERS was inspired by a trip
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INDIAN ROCK SHELTER recounts an eve
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SCENES FROM A MEXICAN VAMPIRE MOVIE
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ABOUT THE POET Brett Rutherford, bo
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