Poems From Providence - The Poet's Press

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7 WEST POINT At West Point Cemetery I come upon the grave, the mass grave of cadets who went half-trained to a Mexican slaughter. <strong>The</strong>y lie in their shrouds, their dress blues, their 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. RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS.
8 SALEM 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
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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,
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One truck hurtling toward gates lik
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These crows are not informers. A sh
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eside him, “Comrade, what if I cr
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And then he will send them away, do
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You have become an allergy, an anti
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IVAN GROZNI Ivan Grozni Tyrant of t
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Yet who are these ghosts that crowd
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dust devil’s playground when all
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Winter is honest, at least, the bui
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all now are only names in peeling p
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PLAGUE It is a plague — an epidem
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JUST REWARDS WELCOME TO HEVIN a sig
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Stalinists and Maoists, Progressive
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THE EVANGELICALS ARE COMING! Who ne
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BLUMENSTÜCKE The parlor frowned wi
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The combinations were shocking as s
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ROADSIDE VIEWS It is the way of tra
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RUINS Passing the gutted neighborho
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WATER SPRITE Who made you, this ful
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It draws us, real and unreal mortal
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Time is an endless line wound in a
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A shaman sat here, useless for hunt
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AT THE COKE OVENS I wanted to see m
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I played here as a child, amid the
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Moving to field and orchard, Ben na
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THE CEMETERY BY THE LAKE Edinboro L
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I miss that tree. If one of the gra
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You did not know the gourd was holl
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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
Page 173 and 174: 4 NIGHT SHIFT At two in the morning
Page 175 and 176: They watch for a long time, wait fo
Page 177 and 178: An ectoplasmic virgin blushes, aver
Page 179: for this night of nights, summer’
Page 183 and 184: 9 THE FORGOTTEN GRAVESTONE At Swan
Page 185 and 186: THE McWILLIAMS’ COFFEE TABLE So t
Page 187 and 188: SCENES FROM A MEXICAN VAMPIRE MOVIE
Page 189 and 190: 3 Things go wrong at the American b
Page 191 and 192: Never knew what hit them or how a b
Page 193 and 194: Who wrote the note? The blonde on t
Page 195 and 196: T H U N D E R P U S S: I N M E M O
Page 197 and 198: We keep our vigil against the time
Page 199 and 200: yet terrified, into the hands of th
Page 201 and 202: nothing would daunt your interest i
Page 203 and 204: I watched you dreaming: the twitch
Page 205 and 206: 7 We became one person, shards of t
Page 207 and 208: It was not done in a daze. The sun
Page 209 and 210: A T L O V E C R A F T ’S G R A V
Page 211 and 212: 2 We stand about, a handful swellin
Page 213 and 214: Earth reels beneath our feet into t
Page 215 and 216: 5 Later a golden moon lifts up, swo
Page 217 and 218: LOW TIDE “The tide was flowing ou
Page 219 and 220: Then why should a fireball plummet
Page 221 and 222: In the stillness of museum night, t
Page 223 and 224: And there, the steeple on distant F
Page 225 and 226: prisoners un-decapitated, toxins un
Page 227 and 228: a literary man, to be sure, a lawye
Page 229 and 230: “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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