Frederick Pollack

Five Poems

 

 

The Challenger

 

Where are you going, O son of Sabazius?

– Leopardi, Dialogue between an Elf and a Gnome

 

He accosted girls in the hallways

and – how might he have put it? –

engaged them in conversation:

i.e., picked fights about trivial,

cobbled-together points,

and was always right.

Made no move to touch anyone

or to ask, recognizably, for a date.

They mocked his nearsighted leer

and peculiar, coughing voice.

 

In class he listened to more important

(no doubt) material, an earphone jacked

to his laptop; put it away,

when urged, with a hissing sigh.

Or left the room for ten or twenty minutes.

 

“I’m taking your course because I need the credit.”

“I write the assignments ten minutes before class!”

When asked why, uninvited, he said such things,

he blinked, and smiled with a triumphal smugness.

 

One imagined a store – no, a chain

of stores of some sort, a desk

in a small green office, waiting,

and a father, ignorantly vain.

One may have imagined wrong.

There are fish in the sea of love

who can leave their native layer

without fear of pressure;

who nose the upper air,

then dive beyond measure,

blind to the dark as to what lies above.

 

 

 

Tlaloc and the Tiger

 

Prehistory knew

the most important rooms are in the clouds.

Like this arena/storage-locker filling

with armor, shrapnel, skulls produced

not by the symbolic, endless,

necessary pain occurring here

but by collateral conflicts, real, less real.

Two agonists trample

the junk.  One is Tlaloc,

once lord of rain and drought,

bright turquoise with red stubby fangs.

Children were drowned for him,

washed down with bowls of their collected tears

(their souls, of course, admitted

to the eternal spring of Tlalocan).

He wields the traditional, stylized,

three-tiered obsidian club.  His opponent

the Tiger wears (it’s only fair)

the skin of a man; his weapon

is metal.  They feint, weave,

spit, kick, pant, swing,

leap back, well-muscled from eternal war.

The rear wall

seems also to be missing from this image,

and the vast clouds roll

statically by in their eternal way.

As they fight, the two principles

roar and, perhaps, converse:

I HAVE BEEN DEBASED, yells Tlaloc.

I WAS AN INNOCENTLY HUNGRY GOD.

BUT NOW, BECAUSE OF MY MONSTROUS BLUE

AND SOMEWHAT POPEYED VISAGE,

I SIGNIFY THE WORLD-SYSTEM

THAT DESSICATES AND LIQUEFIES

RATIONALLY YET THOUGHTLESSLY.

And Tiger, evading

a deadly silicate edge, cries I

WHO WAS NATURE DISTINCT FROM MIND

AND AS SUCH DID NOT FEEL

ANYTHING, AM FORCED

TO REPRESENT SOME NEBULOUS GOOD

FOR WHICH PERPLEXED I FIGHT WITH STEEL.

They agree they both kill;

that isn’t the issue, or the value,

if any, at issue.  They try

to kill each other because they kill,

and even hate each other, but only,

as it were, professionally.  On Titan

the clouds are of methane.

Two levels: crystals above,

a fog-layer bombing

the mud ( – 300° F)

with drizzle, two inches per year.

I find this languid vision somehow calming.

 

 

 

Supermarket Never Sleeps

 

I’m not making fun of materialism, I am

myself a refined, even exquisite

materialist.  I want that

particular apple; always have;

would buy the entire quale

of purple-redness.  The neighboring

matrix, herculean crystal, is

the melons suicide-bombers

hope for in Paradise.  The meat

in its candid but subtle packaging comes

from no vulgar materialist.  Fuzzy humanoids

invite me, from cereal boxes.  The PA interrupts

the music of Paradise to announce a

special, in Seafood, on leviathan.

The aisles, only delusively

a grid, are really the Garden

of Forking Paths: my cart might bear me

into another life, of youth and tennis.

On the paperbacks, the girl wearing,

apparently, cloud, is embracing,

undressing me.  The mother with

whom I collide, with

those Christmas-tree-ornament-blond

kids, did not bear them

at the far point of the range

of a big guilty car, but here.

From the surface of lettuce,

lettuce is earth, and

the regular whispering sprinkle

is rain.

 

 

 

The Crossing

 

Far above, the flying bridge

catches the light, which is neither

importantly afternoon nor morning,

but only what is left us

by the towers near the docks.

What angelically privileged

first-class beings,

I wonder, will stand there

(or is it only for the Captain?),

watching the city recede; then,

mid-ocean, striking cinematic poses,

absorbing infinity?  Will I be allowed there,

will we?  For the moment

we wait, ignored, in a gaily-painted

shed, our clothes

so uniformly festive

they may as well be a uniform.

There are always delays; we take them in good part;

what matters is being here, and all through

the crowd, unbuttoned conversations start.

A nearby youth, intensely

and always right, tells

how X parlayed a general store

into a magic realm uniting

banks, ice cream, missiles, footballs, drugs

under one flag; how Y

on the strength of one gadget

(one mind, he insists) built

an even larger empire … He likes

emperors, would evidently be

the abstract one he praises,

The Individual, whose iron reign

is Freedom.  And waits

with joy for my objections to prove me weak.

(They will.  The strength of a thought

is that of habit and obedience.)

I ponder the usual gambits,

reject the one that mentions

pity, and tell him

his heroes are the scum

lapping the docks; had the tide not

washed in that condom, there would be another.

And edge away to find

a liberal to kill time with.

Older (but in our Hawaiian shirts

festooned with cameras, our shorts, we all seem

of an age), he laughs at my story

about the Libertarian, but gently:

he doesn’t like labels,

believes they impose

conflict; he doesn’t like conflict.

Dissolves it with demurrals

like a white blood cell eating viruses;

retreats from proper nouns and wit

into civility, suffering

sensitivity, a kind of pink

cloud-fortress from which

he can see, beyond the ignorant armies,

goodness.  Will turn vicious

if I keep playing with him.  Instead,

the pullulation of the crowd

bears me into advancing sunlight

between the shadow of the shed

and the incalculably white and vast

hull of the ship.  Longshoremen, crew,

and over-crew in white with braid

appear, seem busy, scarcely glance 

at us.  I look at the seagulls.

Should only say

something about the seagulls,

circling, but I’m looking

at them.  At how I made them

so often over the years symbols

of me: beautiful scavengers

(suddenly dun and ugly), eternal exiles

on streets that were, as much as anyone’s, theirs …

Perhaps I can still find someone congenial

to talk to, compagnons de voyage.

Contempt beyond mine.

A faith I could actually threaten.

A Diotima-figure

in a sunhat.  Some grifter

who has conned himself and could at last con me

out of irony.  With whom I could raise

the question that soars and shrills with the gulls:

why I have never thought, here,

of the tropic sea, the sublime tan,

the blessèd isles, the point of the exercise ...

But now a great door opens in the hull,

machines advance, and I know

the cruise is over, or for others;

we are not passengers but cargo.

 

 

 

Stills

 

1

 

December.  They won’t understand: the language

scolding or abstract, the senses

reduced to that one sense of holding on

a week, a month at the outside,

between some minor and some major pain ...

(The young won’t understand.  Whose woods these are.)

Leaves fell, but then the heat returned –

flattering those who have a taste for it

with the same sense of ease

that got us in this mess … The leaves

in piles on rotten fallen logs

resemble large amoeboid dogs.

Bare trees, the dry creek

and light, the mini-mansions up the hill

are all one could desire.  A dog,

two, three dogs from an SUV

parked at the trailhead, and

their overdressed (as if for winter) mistress,

romping alone here should not be

the image the place will leave.

What then?  Adam and Eve,

defiant, bare amidst the brown,

refusing for a moment to leave Eden.

 

2

 

Years back, I sat on a bed and stared at a wall

(once white, the shade once gold, and neither stained)

and in what light came through the long-drawn shade

imagined sitting by that wall

till someone knocked – who, being ignored,

would bring a passkey, enter, and, seeing me,

galvanize institutions (which

prefer to be synchronic)

into narrative, a narrative in which

I would become “he”

and then not even that:

a number, or whatever

is given those who lose their names.

Heroically, I arose.  The camera

held on the wall, but I

was absent in the next few thousand frames.

 

3

 

Avenida Tiradentes …

that should be “Avenue of the Dentists,”

or worse?  Something to do

with the last military regime?

Rich folk-humor

reminding passersby that life is a dream?

There were plans for a tree but no money.

Pink-and-white sidewalk tiles

instead.  Dislodged,

so that the canceled earth might rise and spread.

There are no passersby.  There are cars

but no air.  In the stores,

furniture and dresses bear

the same relation to real goods

that Kant’s conceptual hundred thalers

had to money.  The money likewise. –

A box in the middle distance

(there is no other) may contain

a man who may be wise or dead.

Those lampposts will not work if night should come.

On a screen in a shopwindow,

a telenovela – beautiful innocent

ardent girl in a sumptuous violet

commercial or religious scene;

her flesh is blue and her eyes are green.

 

 

 

Frederick Pollack is 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, forthcoming in 2015 from Prolific Press. He has as appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Representations, Magma (UK), Iota (UK), Bateau, Main Street Rag, and Fulcrum. Online, poems have appeared in DM, Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, and others. Frederick is an adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University.