Five Poems by Frederick Pollack

 

Attempt

 

Rich in the dream, I feel remorse

about a favourite piece,

a dancing-girl or goddess, in my collection.

She comes superbly provenanced

from a poor distant place

(but what is “distance,” now?) that wants

its antiquities back. I could build them a museum …

Take her from her case,

sit with her and a brandy, sighing,

before my largest fireplace; then

(it’s only midnight) call someone

to start the paperwork.

My jet flies toward the dawn.

My bodyguards play endless poker, snore.

From within an air-conditioned, thick-

glazed limo I look

with informed and utter sympathy

at people surviving one day more

in a hot disastrous city. (Make sure

in the dream not to check

if any of the factories bear

my name.) The President of the country,

his Minister of Antiquities and I

stand in a room dense with bodyguards.

I give the Minister the papers,

but he only wants to see

her. Till now a bluff, obsequious

sycophant, he is suddenly a wizened

scholar. “The documents are worthless,”

he announces. “See the liquid motion of

the arm. A girl, even a goddess from

our ancient culture would never

have stood that way. Observe the sardonic, fearless

glance. You’ve been – “ (he delightedly

finds the expression) “rooked.”

And hands the figure back to me. The President

is outraged, but the Minister

says in my ear, “Wherever she’s from,

it’s a place where you are forgiven.”

 

The High Point

 

It’s actually, emotionally,

the low point: we each receive

(in a flat bored tone that precludes

emotionalism, protest)

some phrase, an allusion to

some secret fact or fantasy,

inscrutable to the others (speculation

starts instantly). It’s the voice, I think,

of a certain kind of teacher;

Todd said he was a teacher. But that

comes later. Todd and Martha lead him in

as if he were a blind man. We’d

expected something odorous, street,

dressed in the castoffs of decades, hung

with symbols easy to interpret

(or not, hence meaningless). Instead,

bland suit, dark tie. One glance

and quarter-smile evaluates us, then

he turns his attention to his coffee,

in which he dips a piece of Martha’s shortbread.

We look at each other, wishing (not

in so many words) we were intellectuals

of a former era, chummy, vicious,

lovers or drinking-buddies, socially

important. Instead: a novelist, poet, graphic

artist, indie filmmaker far

from money, as lonely

as anyone, we remember we’re inferior

to names too busy (known) to have answered

this invite. For a moment we recall

the political and natural worlds

beyond Todd’s clanking air-conditioning,

the Last Days of Mankind, etc. At

which point, the alarming presentation

I mentioned comes; we glare at him. “The only

blackmail I request is your attention.

You need to know that, beyond

all decadence and failure, you exist

in eternity. Your efforts do.”

With which a somewhat wider smile,

candid and sympathetic, offering

perhaps no larger friendship but still friendly.

 

Option

 

I don’t know why I rose and left.

His manner was unaggressive, not even

armored in professionalism;

voice friendly-neutral; what he was saying

was more than reasonable, rational.

It was the gestures, no, the hands:

the right palm-up, descending almost

all the way to the desk

for one fact or alternative, then

the left. I suddenly saw them

as hands, tried to imagine

a fist, a caress, a tremor; couldn’t.

Perhaps if he’d been a doctor

discussing my death, I would have unanimously

listened; but this, though important,

perhaps vital for everyone, fell

short. So I stood

and left. Immediately, outside, I felt

the jangled nerves, resentful, half-

self-satisfied guilt some members of

the Other Side may feel, even when

they’ve listened to the entire sermon or

another of their handlers feeding them

the usual bullshit.

 

The Civilian

 

A coalition based on greed and intrigue

has held: three enemy armies

cover the plain. From a rise, twelve

( – numinous number!) survivors

from a military order gaze

at what they know will be their deaths

(and that of their horses, who gaze at grass).

Their lord is dead. At a bark

from the ranking knight, they form

a circle, take the knee, plunge

their swords into earth and chant

the prayer for this occasion. The meaning

of the cross hilt of their swords has long

been one with their function. Thoughts

of escape and possible capture-and-ransom

occur but on a wholly other track.

 

Then, just as they rise, something

without a name appears, at least

to itself. Its reaction

is terror (those swords are serious, and

so casually handled!). Disorientation

also comes, with a sense of brutal, one-

dimensional maleness. And, one

with that, contempt for all questions and

a sensual relationship

with death. It is as nauseous as their smell

of sweat, bad wine, dried gore; but

the corollary sense

of a bond attracts

the interloping sensibility. Which the knights

can’t perceive; shutting

their visors, they mount the horses and ride off.

 

Goof

 

On the stairs you slip on a toy

you haven’t seen since childhood, and didn’t

much like then (though it lived

for years in your room; it left

too much or too little room

for imagination). While you lie

recovering breath and thought and reconnoitering

pain (thinking: the time of disasters

has come, to me as to

the world, and I’m not prepared;

stoic acceptance is a way of

not having to prepare), you notice

a cat you once loved, and who may, in a sense,

have loved you. But she is neither

the corpse you found nor an elegant skeleton; seems

triumphant – not at your expense,

but because something planned or at least foreseen

though the ages of rest is coming to fruition.

You approve; perhaps art

will triumph with it. You haul your wounded body

up, drag your bewildered spine

and inner organs singing their own threnody

outdoors. There a dog (is the shift

from cat to dog too on the nose?) belonging

to the neighbors barks. It is,

you know, a reincarnated lawyer,

and barks because its masters may face trouble

if they become involved. But seeing you,

cold in the overwhelming sun, they laugh; and

you realize that irony, which has for

three centuries sustained the likes of you,

is dead at last, that even

the blues progress toward the ultraviolet.

Frederick Pollack - Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Three collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, forthcoming 2023). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc.  Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review,  Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Lothlorien Poetry Journal (March 2022), etc.