Five Poems by Frederick Pollack

 

Sadness of Diamonds

 

 

The Duchess rather enjoyed these dinners. 

Not quite of the rank that had to 

make much of the prizewinning artist or scholar, 

she sat beside their rivals and shared, 

across the gulf of class, a bond of envy. 

This year her tablemate, a physicist, 

appeared to be in the process 

of being consumed from the shoulders in 

by his tailcoat, from the front by his white tie; 

only his massive glasses shielded him. 

“What have you done?” she asked. – 

“I posited a new element. 

Were it confirmed (but of course it can’t be), 

I’d be up on the dais with the King.” – 

“And were it confirmed, what would it do?” – 

“It would do what’s hoped from every great advance: 

eliminate superstition and mendacity.” 

The Duchess was under no illusion 

that through those lenses he was staring at 

her bosom instead of the diamonds on it, 

whose weight in carats and whose provenance 

he correctly, unasked, proclaimed. 

She almost clapped. “Do you know,” he smiled, 

“that diamonds are secretly unhappy? 

They once were plants – great scaly trees 

like giant pineapples. Then came a period 

of intolerable pressure, when 

they had to bid farewell to their brother coal.” – 

“You’re implying, however,” said the Duchess, 

“their sorrow is only for themselves, 

not altruistic.” “That’s so,” said the scientist. – 

“In which case I can bear them lying where they are.”

 

 

Andromeda

 

 

His ceremonial outfit – 

the tie like a shortened noose – 

pinches the Mayor (fat has begun 

to return, here and there, to the world). 

His path and that of his Captains 

(one, hard-bitten, a woman, 

to recognize the truth that women are equal) 

stains them because it crosses mudflats, 

which are sacred after rain. 

Our tea ceremony bears no 

resemblance to the original, but we don’t know that. 

We have a dark-leafed weed 

(poison in higher concentrations), a sweetish 

thistle, fire, and we know 

the importance of boiling water – 

it is the basis of civilization! 

Before the door of the sacred shed 

stands our lone sacred unimpressive Tree, 

its almost transparent leaves 

clapping weakly as 

the dignitaries enter. 

 

Inevitably the distant noise of sea. 

 

The monotheisms have left us 

the Sermon, more exotic faiths 

the Smile, and the old world as a whole 

the loose shirt the priest wears – 

its vivid strange design called “flowery” – 

with an indecipherable fragment 

hung from his neck (it’s supposed to capture souls). 

He smiles and speaks. “It’s poignant – sad – 

to recall that in one point five billion 

years the sun will have grown so hot  

the oceans will steam and 

the world be wholly what it mostly is. 

Three billion years after that, 

The Andromeda Galaxy 

will begin to merge with ours – imagine 

the night, my friends, an enormous wheel 

of stars intersecting our 

familiar clouded line; it would mean 

a joyous contemplative life to him  

who stood and watched! But at the same moment –  

oh how grievous and strange, 

my friends – the sun 

will swell and eat the waterless airless  

cinder we have become. So that even  

if one were there to see he couldn’t – ” The priest 

collapses at this point, and the Mayor and 

his Captains, weeping, wrap 

their arms around him with 

the compassion authorities have for each other. 

(They will bear knives in their hands should religion change.)

 

 

They Are Spread Out

 

 

They are spread out along a road. 

Crops failed 

a third time, half the old 

and two-thirds of the young 

died; the rest 

walked west. There was a truck 

some kilometers back; 

ethnoreligiously different 

former herders set upon it 

and them. To the south, possible 

minerals, interested 

Chinese, and so the Americans 

finance the faction that financed 

the raiders. Now on some faces 

 

(though not that of the woman 

with the obviously dead  

child), unusual awareness 

of heat, and the look  

of those who must contemplate, 

without particular qualification, 

last things. Soon the herdsmen 

will return to harvest – 

rape, burn, perhaps eat – 

those who remain. Whose look  

questions Wittgenstein, who said that 

“Death is not an event in life”; 

thirst and these experiences 

are.

 

 

His Views

 

 

Perfect the gaze that momentarily 

or rudely, rheumily, prolongedly 

(over the drink that burns your tongue 

or liver and which, in any case, 

you can barely taste) sears 

the young (i.e., those heedlessly, 

unjustly in possession 

of youth), or which would sear them if  

they noticed, as of course they don’t, 

which doesn’t matter, for the gaze 

exists and is perfected for 

its own sake, like what lies behind it, 

or art, or (for conservatives) law.

 

 

Recessed Lighting

 

 

It’s hard to tell if they’re carrying, 

wheeling, guiding, pushing or 

attending him, from their clump 

of serious offroad vehicles towards 

the meadow. Hard to see 

expressions at this distance, or even 

where they leave off and he begins, 

except as a vortex, a passive area. 

Perhaps, beneath the successful 

self-advertisement of the meadow – 

bird-song, bird-shadows, the seeming 

consciousness of the framing woods – 

he’s just afraid  

of snakes, gnats, or the famous bite  

that drains one’s years before it ends them. 

 

Becoming briefly visible among 

the ambiguous others (is it they 

who want to tread the long grasses, 

before they tug them out for ore or oil?), 

he looks the sort who would rule, 

over coffee, the sort of room 

where history plots and people hide from it. 

A long, considering unstare. 

A flash of helplessness or tolerance. 

Imagination manifesting with 

exhaustion, to the effect that we 

are circuitized survivors imagining 

bodies, hallucinating 

nature against an unexciting 

backdrop of endtimes. 

 

The moment before he breaks, a fox 

runs from the forest, calculating 

that the humans are too far away 

to seize, if they’re interested, her prey 

or her. The sky, which throughout 

has hidden possibilities 

of hurt, shifts, dapples then dulls 

the woods and grasses. You can hope the mouse 

or whatever escapes 

the fox. That the central man 

escapes – if it is an escape – 

his keepers. That the trees 

are real, that his arms, themselves  

like insubstantial branches, find 

a new way to embrace them.

Frederick Pollack - Author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; reissued April 2022 by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and three collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023). 

In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere.

Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, OffCourse, Lothlorien Poetry Journal (2022, 2023) and elsewhere.

 

Website: www.frederickpollack.com.