The Literary Review
Used, Good Condition
They’re more fables than stories –
he keeps referring to “the Tyrant”
and “henchmen.” The characters,
all very small-town, seem to want to
walk on all fours, if that’s
what Aesop creatures do, and talk like them,
naturally,
univocally. They cheered
the Tyrant, but that’s all in the past;
now nuclear weapons
a few miles east and west
of the village keep them honest.
(Some strangers appear, presumably
the heroes; seem human, don’t talk much.)
One or two critics
at the time spoke of kitsch, but
the guy who wrote the intro
dismisses them; he mentions all the right
Parisian names.
What bothers me, beside the brown and brittle
pages, is that everything is past –
in both text and intro
the Tyrant and his henchmen won’t
be back. A laundress, the blacksmith
say “guilt” at one point but
what’s going on is innocence. A sort of
fog seems to settle
over the words; the spine flakes.
So – back where it was
for more dust? It isn’t Ionesco or Beckett,
and one has to cull
before everything goes. Sometimes I browse
my own shelves without wanting to read.
- Frederick Pollack
Safe
Eventually he was found, fed,
warmed, cleaned, physically
healed, not forced
to do tricks as he thought of them
(which may have included
being made to believe things), not
tricked. But it was too late
(they may have thought but never said);
he never
learned trust. Would not, for example,
be touched. Didn’t
“act out,” grew quieter if anything. Had
his favorite spots. Watched, aged. All
that seemed in the end to matter
was consistency and lack of ambiguity.
I apologize for the latter:
he may have been a cat
or mankind in the cosmos
or one part of the mind in another.
- Frederick Pollack
Planck Scale
Useless all morning. Stumbled upon,
trying to process,
a formula that explains all
my failures, ties the many into one.
(Of course you alone are responsible:
you alone can be punished.)
Meanwhile dishes pile up, the phone rang.
I shall write a full confession, sign it,
text it to every name,
print copies and distribute them
on the street. Most will reject it,
shun me, but one or two
of the young
may bear it to the other country.
- Frederick Pollack
My Childhood
So many emotions entered
that hearty peasant soup
that after sixty years it tastes
only of starch.
- Frederick Pollack
Fortress of Solitude
There are types of solitude. Each has
its own culture, politics,
and moments of crisis. For the rich
these are brief, for they know whom to call
to make things go away. Elsewhere,
in rear apartments, offices,
and solitudes more diffuse,
there may or may not be a knock at the door;
crises are more concentrated when
what goes away experiences them.
I’m not sure it’s still there.
In memory, it let everyone in
as long as they talked softly to themselves,
kept their bags by their feet, and didn’t stink
too much. (A student once complained;
said he would have moved
to an empty table but there were none.
Affixing responsibility
to a staff-person, her reluctance,
confrontation and upshot went on for some time.)
Students slept
on books and laptops. Deal-makers
made deals, lovers parted, high-school girls
laughed; for such, locale is irrelevant.
In winter the smells of coffee and slush
merged into something like dog, and the sound
was also a composite:
aforementioned laughter, quarrels,
talk, a kind of music, drifts
of news I recall as boring, an ad
(though this is an anachronism)
that asked what was in my wallet.
I expressed my early genius there,
in notebooks between stares
at girls who were never alone or didn’t
wait, or straining to hear
conversations I wouldn’t enter.
My early work was bad. It involved
one figure trying to be two:
a kid’s loneliness and the kid, who had
forgotten how not to hate.
- Frederick Pollack
A Deserter
I was killing time in Long Beach during
the first disasters, thinking how
the past tense and the distinction “early”/“late”
are a defense; as if the history
we are could take a breather in
the notes of a historian.
I sat on a bench in a once-deadly park,
now no more so than other places;
the sirens weren’t coming for my beer.
A tanker glowed on the horizon,
had burned a week, but the wind had shifted;
the night was almost still, there was almost air.
In the weeds opposite a vortex formed
and someone stepped from it and looked around
beneath the weight of helmet, pack, and what
I took to be a shoulder-mounted laser.
I offered her some beer. She didn’t
sit, spoke only telepathically
(I sensed it was a combat skill,
not to be wasted on emotion). The future, she said,
is exponentially worse,
but she was almost safe now – two more hops;
looked forward, in fact, to the Lindy Hop
and the clubs on Central Avenue. I asked
if I might see her face. For a moment
as her tunnel reformed she raised
that intimidating visor. I could see
betrayal, ravage, rage, no room for beauty.
- Frederick Pollack