Someone was trying to reach me.
There were many pings on the phone,
but when I reached it, no message.
An appeal for funds, from someone on
our desperate side (I’d commiserate,
at length, or lie, say we gave);
a robot praising some commodity;
one of the long-lost friends
I keep track of in my mind, not
the world; the sort of threat from
an authority or firm that never
quite names itself, terrifying
the old, demanding payment
(I insult their human hirelings,
who are also probably desperate).
Or perhaps, at last
(I could lie that I’ve long expected it, which
might deepen the emotional appeal
of the poem), it was that call from elsewhere,
tapping, no, stumbling into
our grid, our systems,
not knowing who I am or what we are,
immensely powerful and ignorant.
Retablo
We must drink to the uneven sidewalk
that caused a fall. I landed on
my wrist; it didn’t break,
wasn’t even sprained, just hurt a while.
So that pavement, poured
perhaps under Nixon, could have been deadlier
but wasn’t. There has also,
up to this point, been history,
crazed traffic, ticks that remained
in trees as I passed,
mind-numbing afternoons that
delivered no random virus. To what,
exactly, do we drink, however?
Chance is another name
for the void, and it is that which has blessed
this table, provided
specters who raise their glasses to my toast.
Noble Lie
They were about to do something
hallowed. By a vast oral tradition,
art, the very arrangement
of huts, but it would hurt.
He realized this, and a strange thing happened
to images of his totem, clan,
father (or was it uncles in that culture?),
future, permissible women –
they moved. Shifted, as in a frame
with multiple grooves. And he too moved.
Because he fled, he became
(in that culture) one of
the faceless. But as he fled he realized he
still had a face: it sweated
and hungered. As he ran he encountered
youths with different skin colors,
types of rags and degrees of grief,
fleeing. Some had miraculous but broken tech.
Some had supplies; he hunted;
they shared. Over campfires he described
his culture. “Mine seemed to have no rules at all,”
said a new friend. “But I realized
they all do. Where there seem
to be none, it’s a way
of keeping you confused, which still means
predictable.” After various grim adventures
the survivors of that cohort
entered a gleaming, unfortified
realm where they were each
presented with a rulebook and my poems.
Greeting
A past love appears.
You immediately rejoin
the complex of anticipations, gifts,
evasions you half-accepted, half-
imposed. Along the margins of
that world awareness that it’s gone
hovers, creatures of that awareness
mutter, are ignored. A somber
(cowled?) figure who represents
your present self looks almost clownish.
But the voice of the past
love is not inviting, as it was at
the beginning; nor are the eyes,
the posture; they express something
worse than the final anger, worse even than
indifference: “Time is
not pure. It’s full of diseases,
some of which seem eternal. None are incurable
(for time), but the only cure
is more of itself, which makes the whole thing suspect.”
Chienlit
When under attack
for the grubbiness of my study
I respond, I think reasonably,
that only 4%
of the universe is what we call matter,
and that most of that
is dust. It swirls
at the heart
of, and in between
galaxies; gathers, condenses,
gives birth to stars.
Then, looking perhaps
ashamed, I observe
the chaos, create ruts with
two fingers in
the dust atop rejected manuscripts.
But I don’t stop there: I gather
those ancient flakes of body,
dandruff of capitalism,
offal of history into
a pile in my hand and squeeze,
squeeze harder, heating.
Frederick Pollack - Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals (Lothlorien Poetry Journal 2022, ’23, ’24, ’25). Website: www.frederickpollack.com.
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