May 2015
Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both published by Story Line Press. A collection of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, just published by Prolific Press (available at Amazon). Other poems in print and online journals. Adjunct professor creative writing George Washington University.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Poverty-Words-Frederick-Pollack/dp/1632750198/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_1
http://www.amazon.com/A-Poverty-Words-Frederick-Pollack/dp/1632750198/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_1
Leo
Berkeley
The tunnel, an accident of walls, at
someone’s behest repaved and given
steps, connected
Math, Engineering, the gym, a few fugitive
humanities classrooms, to the
shops (adorned always
with the school’s, the Team’s colors) on
Durant. The feet
of students alone swept
crumpled wrappers, papers and
leaflets from it, while
young shoulders wore away
the grafitti – which,
after the Seventies,
were replenished by only the usual
imprecations and sexual horror, except
for LEO IN ’84, high up
in red. The date was freshened,
with a finicky line drawn
through the old one four years later
and a faint THIS WILL BE TRUE. It
appeared on the adult cinema,
a Benetton and a grade-school,
also. Stooped, with specs,
in the rags of a good
grey tweed, he held
forth in the tunnel once.
From behind, the students,
descending those steps
at the end and turning,
appeared to vanish into light.
I thought, Why not? – imagined
jowly regulars cleaning
and pressing him with
the pity the powerful
enjoy showing
the powerful, or vetted weaklings.
The voice was OK: he could read from
the teleprompter, chat vaguely, walk
the corridors of the Residence,
exchanging smiles with guards. Perhaps
in the woods at Camp David,
replete with silence and safety (one
can’t have enough of those),
he could sit and wipe his glasses
and think at last, I’m mad.
Place in the Sun
The attendant
mocks. Our disagreement,
says the attendant
to anyone who’ll listen (and
they do listen), meanwhile
leaving the chair
anywhere, is fundamental:
“why should he think
pain is privileged, or the reified self?
Where does he
get off?” etc. … Break, smoke,
lunch;
flirtation with
a dog and its walker, another break.
It is a brisk blue day;
the buds outface
the wind as if
the sun, not
warmth, were all
they needed. Eventually a wrap
will be fluffed over
legs, the arms propped
in thinker-position. The face remains
mine, and
glad it doesn’t tremble
or blink.
All Souls Night
I imagine that twenty or twenty-five years after
the last time we met, Ray returns
and tells me he was wrong
to enter a cult.
He woke up one day – some petty incident
at the seventy-hour job
that let him buy course after course and rise from level to level
of pseudo-power, pseudo-autonomy,
had told him (he let it tell him)
he had wasted decades. Now –
except for the grey in his still-thick, still
razor-cut hair,
and surfer looks leathered
by something other than sun –
his affect is what I recall:
fanatically eager
for passionate insight,
for my latest galvanizing word.
Dave also appears, with fewer regrets.
In some respects he too has scarcely changed.
Describing the software
that made him rich three times,
the mechanics of bankruptcy,
the careers of his kids, he assumes
my boredom derives
from some flaw in his explanations, which he
repeats. His youth was vague, obedient,
and gravely, now, he states
how much he has missed art and music,
our discussions of Sartre, Artaud, Hamsun, Bergman,
Antonioni, Lukács – will he list all
the obsolete names?
Whatever self he found, he says,
he never fully identified with it;
nor could he be satisfied only with action, with process.
And Mel, the bottle and pills set by,
trying to regain
with damaged tools his early brilliance,
Carla released from hell,
and Becky, serious at last,
seem likewise disappointed that I’m not.
As I mildly ask them where and how they lived,
show house and haunts,
critique my career,
and fussily pour whatever they want to drink,
some nameless hope is lost.
Perhaps what they feel
is what you feel, cued for
a poem, encountering only
psychologizing,
historicizing, and asking
where is the beauty? Where is the timeless thrill?
Title Poem
I know it happened, and await a déjà vu
to clarify when
and where I descended from trees through scrub
to grass, a surprisingly broad valley.
Was the sky mottled and cool, or hot and stagnant?
Did the fence I recall belong to a bureau or firm?
It’s unclear – as are the road and parking lot
that must have been before me, and the appointment,
probably tenuous, I brooded on.
In those days, at the end of a day or drive
or thought, there was often a girl, who might
be possible. Or a severe, maturing
theory. Or the troubled counsel of friends.
Of all this, all that’s left is that slice of meadow
and a white, corrugated shed
with a sealed grey door
among untrampled weeds, and above the door
a yellow, humming, flyblown, wired light.
– I don’t know why this image bothers me.
Is it the waste of power, or power?
Some randomness, a redundancy in daylight?
The wait for night, when effort is less futile?
It isn’t even clearly a negative image.
And I don’t know where I’m going.
I live the way I remember:
discrete points, unconvinced interpretations.
Yet I move, and rarely seem to stumble
in my own vast shadow.
Care
They had the look of having wakened
to sing away night horrors
or hold frail whining shoulders till,
its helmet rebuckled,
a head could bang its quilted wall in peace
for twenty years. Or of attending,
through trackless hours, epic voyages
to the hall bathroom (spotless, even dusty
now) and back; of combing hair, and changing
bags whose tubes hung like pale filigree
in a boudoir; of applying makeup
for trips into the unaccustomed day,
and talking, through pureed and sliced and flung
dinners, to enraged incomprehension
as if to someone.
The “space” they mentioned took a while to grasp,
for their pine-paneled walls
were full of beer-mugs, beer-mirrors, pictures
of sailing ships, and framed enameled spoons
collected in the margin of their lives.
It was the wife who joined me on the deck
for an illicit cigarette; the husband,
himself no longer moving well or much,
conversed a while with Phylis, though he knew
as well as Phylis that we wouldn’t buy.
The view was nice. The wife
smoked happily and guiltily and worried
where to put our filters, but barely spoke.
Sunlight, emerging, struck
the curtained window of a pricier house
beside the chapel that had marked their lane,
as we drove out into irrelevance.
Berkeley
The tunnel, an accident of walls, at
someone’s behest repaved and given
steps, connected
Math, Engineering, the gym, a few fugitive
humanities classrooms, to the
shops (adorned always
with the school’s, the Team’s colors) on
Durant. The feet
of students alone swept
crumpled wrappers, papers and
leaflets from it, while
young shoulders wore away
the grafitti – which,
after the Seventies,
were replenished by only the usual
imprecations and sexual horror, except
for LEO IN ’84, high up
in red. The date was freshened,
with a finicky line drawn
through the old one four years later
and a faint THIS WILL BE TRUE. It
appeared on the adult cinema,
a Benetton and a grade-school,
also. Stooped, with specs,
in the rags of a good
grey tweed, he held
forth in the tunnel once.
From behind, the students,
descending those steps
at the end and turning,
appeared to vanish into light.
I thought, Why not? – imagined
jowly regulars cleaning
and pressing him with
the pity the powerful
enjoy showing
the powerful, or vetted weaklings.
The voice was OK: he could read from
the teleprompter, chat vaguely, walk
the corridors of the Residence,
exchanging smiles with guards. Perhaps
in the woods at Camp David,
replete with silence and safety (one
can’t have enough of those),
he could sit and wipe his glasses
and think at last, I’m mad.
Place in the Sun
The attendant
mocks. Our disagreement,
says the attendant
to anyone who’ll listen (and
they do listen), meanwhile
leaving the chair
anywhere, is fundamental:
“why should he think
pain is privileged, or the reified self?
Where does he
get off?” etc. … Break, smoke,
lunch;
flirtation with
a dog and its walker, another break.
It is a brisk blue day;
the buds outface
the wind as if
the sun, not
warmth, were all
they needed. Eventually a wrap
will be fluffed over
legs, the arms propped
in thinker-position. The face remains
mine, and
glad it doesn’t tremble
or blink.
All Souls Night
I imagine that twenty or twenty-five years after
the last time we met, Ray returns
and tells me he was wrong
to enter a cult.
He woke up one day – some petty incident
at the seventy-hour job
that let him buy course after course and rise from level to level
of pseudo-power, pseudo-autonomy,
had told him (he let it tell him)
he had wasted decades. Now –
except for the grey in his still-thick, still
razor-cut hair,
and surfer looks leathered
by something other than sun –
his affect is what I recall:
fanatically eager
for passionate insight,
for my latest galvanizing word.
Dave also appears, with fewer regrets.
In some respects he too has scarcely changed.
Describing the software
that made him rich three times,
the mechanics of bankruptcy,
the careers of his kids, he assumes
my boredom derives
from some flaw in his explanations, which he
repeats. His youth was vague, obedient,
and gravely, now, he states
how much he has missed art and music,
our discussions of Sartre, Artaud, Hamsun, Bergman,
Antonioni, Lukács – will he list all
the obsolete names?
Whatever self he found, he says,
he never fully identified with it;
nor could he be satisfied only with action, with process.
And Mel, the bottle and pills set by,
trying to regain
with damaged tools his early brilliance,
Carla released from hell,
and Becky, serious at last,
seem likewise disappointed that I’m not.
As I mildly ask them where and how they lived,
show house and haunts,
critique my career,
and fussily pour whatever they want to drink,
some nameless hope is lost.
Perhaps what they feel
is what you feel, cued for
a poem, encountering only
psychologizing,
historicizing, and asking
where is the beauty? Where is the timeless thrill?
Title Poem
I know it happened, and await a déjà vu
to clarify when
and where I descended from trees through scrub
to grass, a surprisingly broad valley.
Was the sky mottled and cool, or hot and stagnant?
Did the fence I recall belong to a bureau or firm?
It’s unclear – as are the road and parking lot
that must have been before me, and the appointment,
probably tenuous, I brooded on.
In those days, at the end of a day or drive
or thought, there was often a girl, who might
be possible. Or a severe, maturing
theory. Or the troubled counsel of friends.
Of all this, all that’s left is that slice of meadow
and a white, corrugated shed
with a sealed grey door
among untrampled weeds, and above the door
a yellow, humming, flyblown, wired light.
– I don’t know why this image bothers me.
Is it the waste of power, or power?
Some randomness, a redundancy in daylight?
The wait for night, when effort is less futile?
It isn’t even clearly a negative image.
And I don’t know where I’m going.
I live the way I remember:
discrete points, unconvinced interpretations.
Yet I move, and rarely seem to stumble
in my own vast shadow.
Care
They had the look of having wakened
to sing away night horrors
or hold frail whining shoulders till,
its helmet rebuckled,
a head could bang its quilted wall in peace
for twenty years. Or of attending,
through trackless hours, epic voyages
to the hall bathroom (spotless, even dusty
now) and back; of combing hair, and changing
bags whose tubes hung like pale filigree
in a boudoir; of applying makeup
for trips into the unaccustomed day,
and talking, through pureed and sliced and flung
dinners, to enraged incomprehension
as if to someone.
The “space” they mentioned took a while to grasp,
for their pine-paneled walls
were full of beer-mugs, beer-mirrors, pictures
of sailing ships, and framed enameled spoons
collected in the margin of their lives.
It was the wife who joined me on the deck
for an illicit cigarette; the husband,
himself no longer moving well or much,
conversed a while with Phylis, though he knew
as well as Phylis that we wouldn’t buy.
The view was nice. The wife
smoked happily and guiltily and worried
where to put our filters, but barely spoke.
Sunlight, emerging, struck
the curtained window of a pricier house
beside the chapel that had marked their lane,
as we drove out into irrelevance.
©2015 Frederick Pollack