March 2016
Frederick Pollack
fpollack@comcast.net
fpollack@comcast.net
I am the 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, which was published in March 2015 by Prolific Press (available at Amazon), and I have other poems in print and online journals. I am an adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University.
Fourth Quarter
eal þis eorþan gesteal idel weorþeð!
“The Wanderer” (Anglo-Saxon)
Five PM / 1700.
Dow, FTSE, Frankfurt down.
Dark. I drive to the suburbs.
They’re a peculiar mix
of American and European
meanings of the word.
Ethnoreligiously challenged
non- or quasi-citizens, i.e.,
the poor, have killed the elevator.
They let me pass, I don’t know why.
Every square meter
of wall is graffitied: a triumph,
perhaps, of the word.
But the flat I seek
is well-lit, with kids’ drawings,
nice sofa and fridge, plasma screens.
I’m expecting God-talk, the type
supposedly validated
by bulging Bambi eyes, tendons and veins.
The sort I’m frankly too evolved to hear –
a decalogue for lizards, Good News
for baboons. But the message here
is, “Signifiers become depleted.
The most deep-rooted allegories fail.
Words frame the world, but
‘all this earth’s frame shall stand empty.’”
Then they turn back to the game.
Unaggressively showing my gun,
I edge down the stairwell.
On the roads it’s still rush-hour
and shopping hour, and visions –
one must put it like this –
of boxes, glitter,
Santa Claus and forgiveness fill
the cars. The minds of the drivers,
that is, and spouses. The kids perceive nothing.
You the Man
He pauses at length before each answer,
annoyingly recalling
that trick I sometimes encounter
of pretending not to have heard
or to be unable to credit
the question. Then I realize
the pause is proportional to his years
spent caring for his mother. Those
and the immediately preceding
failure of his first marriage left
a chronic doubt, a sense of being
behind the curve, blocked by a wave
from sight of any shore. I can relate;
my first joint-living-arrangement
failed. But I spent
the next five years alone, learning to write.
And I affect no timid smile;
rather push, with humor if possible,
or terrifying analyses or silence,
through what would otherwise be
the silence of others. After
she died he remained
in his mother’s house, which he had
maintained and improved for her.
At work, some of his buddies
eventually fixed him up; they thought it was time.
I ask about office buddies:
how close are those relationships?
Do they relieve the boredom
of office life or merely somehow
orbit it? And the bridge
between his eyes and mine fails
again. But he eagerly outlines
his courtship and, with sincere
abstract superlatives, his wife,
whom I conceive as having once
been lost. She moved
into his mortgageless house, where they began
to save. I’m impressed;
would have thought that, seeking life,
freedom, arrival, they would have splurged,
as one does. But they had,
late in life, two girls instead.
I imagine his movements, doubly
cautious with that papoose-pack,
whatever it’s called, on his chest.
He leaps two decades:
they are both now office-workers;
he too, still; the wife is ill,
but he hopes and believes “we’ll make it.”
I smile at him. Humility, no doubt,
is called for. It would do no good
to resent the fact that he never
asks me anything. Humbly, I try
to describe my late marriage,
and how grateful I am, for her,
to chance, to nothing in particular.
And in simple terms to explain
my work, the poem I’m writing
about him, the motives behind it.
But the expression with which
he greets what he thinks he’s hearing
would be called unearthly, on this or any earth.
Diner in Rockville
You know that each moment, however patchwork
(mere transit, refueling),
partakes of the Absolute
to which your least thought is a recondite
footnote,
that the girl at the counter, foursquare
at the crossroads her beauty
forever places her in, is yours
in eternity
(desire also returning),
that although global warming
seeds the planet
with squalid, survivor-eating
flowers, the vast
library of leaves this past,
moist October has opened
remains. That the barely fictional
madman who handed
the last non-professional
to speak with him his greatest
work, a blank book, then dismissed
her philistine refusal or
unwillingness to interpret,
was right. So if the door opened,
and the friend
who never quite existed
entered and ordered
something inadequate,
what would you discuss
or do but turn away, the gold leaves flying?
Bespoke
They only show it
at the last moment,
the current already flowing,
the trauma part of the process.
Its eyes snap open. One
archetype or mood
would call its non-expression horror,
another something very different ... I
can’t express
the emotional mess
that comes with these electrodes. Pecs
I never possessed, the famous
“sixpack” abs; and hair,
my hair, my jaw (which means
my mother’s, with my father’s teeth);
but fifteen calories per pound
maintenance, not my lifelong nine –
I will be able to EAT;
and yearn towards him,
it. Understandably.
(That improbable penis.) Me.
Nurse supports a palsied head
and liverspotted, spongy arms;
tubes and wires sway.
Do I want to look back at myself?
Kill it, I say.
Yonder Come Miss Rosie
The morning count allows the guards
to look responsible, serious, and
as if they can count. Despite
the prisoners’ constant muddled
comparison of this camp to the old
Nazi type (some are mentally composing
memoirs for when they’re free), it’s
different. They joke about accents,
jeer, speculate about
the guards and their first cousins, sisters,
sheep. When a guard periodically
loses it, a fist, boots, and teeth fly,
and other prisoners
consign the one hurt to the class of those
who get hurt (below theirs). Really,
by now there’s little ideological
difference between the two sides
of the wire. It isn’t, prisoners
think, as if we’re not Christian
or white. Service is tendered
for little amenities, promises made
of money or future jobs, at which
a guard will revert for a moment,
as if gratefully, to respect. But there are
still hangings, which everyone
is lined up (and counted) to see, and one
must work sixteen hours on grits and
Velveeta to clear
kudzu. It grows back.
eal þis eorþan gesteal idel weorþeð!
“The Wanderer” (Anglo-Saxon)
Five PM / 1700.
Dow, FTSE, Frankfurt down.
Dark. I drive to the suburbs.
They’re a peculiar mix
of American and European
meanings of the word.
Ethnoreligiously challenged
non- or quasi-citizens, i.e.,
the poor, have killed the elevator.
They let me pass, I don’t know why.
Every square meter
of wall is graffitied: a triumph,
perhaps, of the word.
But the flat I seek
is well-lit, with kids’ drawings,
nice sofa and fridge, plasma screens.
I’m expecting God-talk, the type
supposedly validated
by bulging Bambi eyes, tendons and veins.
The sort I’m frankly too evolved to hear –
a decalogue for lizards, Good News
for baboons. But the message here
is, “Signifiers become depleted.
The most deep-rooted allegories fail.
Words frame the world, but
‘all this earth’s frame shall stand empty.’”
Then they turn back to the game.
Unaggressively showing my gun,
I edge down the stairwell.
On the roads it’s still rush-hour
and shopping hour, and visions –
one must put it like this –
of boxes, glitter,
Santa Claus and forgiveness fill
the cars. The minds of the drivers,
that is, and spouses. The kids perceive nothing.
You the Man
He pauses at length before each answer,
annoyingly recalling
that trick I sometimes encounter
of pretending not to have heard
or to be unable to credit
the question. Then I realize
the pause is proportional to his years
spent caring for his mother. Those
and the immediately preceding
failure of his first marriage left
a chronic doubt, a sense of being
behind the curve, blocked by a wave
from sight of any shore. I can relate;
my first joint-living-arrangement
failed. But I spent
the next five years alone, learning to write.
And I affect no timid smile;
rather push, with humor if possible,
or terrifying analyses or silence,
through what would otherwise be
the silence of others. After
she died he remained
in his mother’s house, which he had
maintained and improved for her.
At work, some of his buddies
eventually fixed him up; they thought it was time.
I ask about office buddies:
how close are those relationships?
Do they relieve the boredom
of office life or merely somehow
orbit it? And the bridge
between his eyes and mine fails
again. But he eagerly outlines
his courtship and, with sincere
abstract superlatives, his wife,
whom I conceive as having once
been lost. She moved
into his mortgageless house, where they began
to save. I’m impressed;
would have thought that, seeking life,
freedom, arrival, they would have splurged,
as one does. But they had,
late in life, two girls instead.
I imagine his movements, doubly
cautious with that papoose-pack,
whatever it’s called, on his chest.
He leaps two decades:
they are both now office-workers;
he too, still; the wife is ill,
but he hopes and believes “we’ll make it.”
I smile at him. Humility, no doubt,
is called for. It would do no good
to resent the fact that he never
asks me anything. Humbly, I try
to describe my late marriage,
and how grateful I am, for her,
to chance, to nothing in particular.
And in simple terms to explain
my work, the poem I’m writing
about him, the motives behind it.
But the expression with which
he greets what he thinks he’s hearing
would be called unearthly, on this or any earth.
Diner in Rockville
You know that each moment, however patchwork
(mere transit, refueling),
partakes of the Absolute
to which your least thought is a recondite
footnote,
that the girl at the counter, foursquare
at the crossroads her beauty
forever places her in, is yours
in eternity
(desire also returning),
that although global warming
seeds the planet
with squalid, survivor-eating
flowers, the vast
library of leaves this past,
moist October has opened
remains. That the barely fictional
madman who handed
the last non-professional
to speak with him his greatest
work, a blank book, then dismissed
her philistine refusal or
unwillingness to interpret,
was right. So if the door opened,
and the friend
who never quite existed
entered and ordered
something inadequate,
what would you discuss
or do but turn away, the gold leaves flying?
Bespoke
They only show it
at the last moment,
the current already flowing,
the trauma part of the process.
Its eyes snap open. One
archetype or mood
would call its non-expression horror,
another something very different ... I
can’t express
the emotional mess
that comes with these electrodes. Pecs
I never possessed, the famous
“sixpack” abs; and hair,
my hair, my jaw (which means
my mother’s, with my father’s teeth);
but fifteen calories per pound
maintenance, not my lifelong nine –
I will be able to EAT;
and yearn towards him,
it. Understandably.
(That improbable penis.) Me.
Nurse supports a palsied head
and liverspotted, spongy arms;
tubes and wires sway.
Do I want to look back at myself?
Kill it, I say.
Yonder Come Miss Rosie
The morning count allows the guards
to look responsible, serious, and
as if they can count. Despite
the prisoners’ constant muddled
comparison of this camp to the old
Nazi type (some are mentally composing
memoirs for when they’re free), it’s
different. They joke about accents,
jeer, speculate about
the guards and their first cousins, sisters,
sheep. When a guard periodically
loses it, a fist, boots, and teeth fly,
and other prisoners
consign the one hurt to the class of those
who get hurt (below theirs). Really,
by now there’s little ideological
difference between the two sides
of the wire. It isn’t, prisoners
think, as if we’re not Christian
or white. Service is tendered
for little amenities, promises made
of money or future jobs, at which
a guard will revert for a moment,
as if gratefully, to respect. But there are
still hangings, which everyone
is lined up (and counted) to see, and one
must work sixteen hours on grits and
Velveeta to clear
kudzu. It grows back.
©2016 Frederick Pollack