Poems
by Frederick Pollack

 

The Helper

 

Often what happens

when I talk is that my ship

encounters the edge of the ice

much farther south than is expected now.

And although the hull is strong,

the men well-trained and loyal,

the radio fails, we’re trapped in the floes

and drift beyond what other people

or I immediately understand.

 

And polar bears and their cubs

no longer crying and drowning,

seals with their low humor,

and a giant dark vast-antlered thing

I hadn’t known (and therefore no one knew)

existed thank me for solid,

contiguous, endless land. (By which they mean

ice, until it comes to moss and lichen,

slow-rusting missiles, withered radar domes,

and ruins where bears learn to open cans.)

 

I say You’re welcome, but I’ve no idea

how I’m responsible for this bounty.

Of course I sympathized, but hardly spoke

effectively on your behalf. That doesn’t

matter, the animals say; we animals

know how what can’t be named may be desired.

Now while the sea is briefly clear you

must take your crew home,

for only the loved dead can warm the others.

 

 

 

 

 

Relative

 

Slow, odorous,

variously dismaying,

the (American) train doesn’t

break down when it reaches

the marginal place, but wants to,

spiritually does;

only a zombie

proceeds to the city. The train soul joins

the piles of parts and former wholes

that mark the marginal place.

 

Which as such should project

a sense of (“unbearable”) lightness but

instead feels as dense

as a neutron star, as

do you. Your feet swell, head shrinks.

The piles in the place you

go to, some mobile

and loved, echo those you have passed;

dialogue, dinner,

time proceed

without future. Although we lost touch

before we were born, you are still, cousin,

a spiritual brother,

surveying your cartoon.

 

 

 

 

 

The Darkest Inch

 

 Give him the darkest inch your shelf affords …

   Robinson

 

Half the night reading a dead white male.

Not exactly forgotten. Which differs from

“not entirely”; suggests

a recondite, elite torture

involving both his fans, like me, and him.

For if, for poets, “not all dies,”

a part may suffer ectoplasmic pain;

likewise his fans when trying to recommend him. – 

Tough, almost “hard.” Almost no mention of

the successive layers of cruelty –

prole, lumpen, marginal bourgeois – through which

he passed. All cruelty is political,

compassion not like oil in the earth

but some rare necessary ore.

I’ve said more than enough. He wouldn’t have.

 

I studied under Bloom, who sold more

than any poet and is also forgotten.

His idea of Oedipal conflict between

a “strong” poet and a later one –

yes, yes, I know, both obviously male –

had some truth in my case:

imagine Yeats a Marxist. I did.

But there’s another paradigm – someone

who stands slightly behind

your shoulder saying harsh things, so that

at first he seems an enemy. Then

you realize it isn’t so much you that matters; that

through you because of him

something comes into the world

that isn’t evil but is happy here.

 

 

 

 

 

The Lark Ascending

 

The pile the builders left achieved

the glamor of ruin without ever becoming

the great planned temple and its neighborhood.

Yet pilgrims, tourists, homebuyers

still come, refusing to be told

there’s nothing here, demanding housing and peace.

“No peace here, mate,” say the guards, and when

the press becomes too great out come the truncheons.

To a bird the complex looks,

its lack of trees aside, like any other settlement;

even those suburbs whose dogs the birds

mistakenly perceive as the dominant species.

For they have variety: the tiny mad ones

with bulging eyes must be the poets,

the elegant long coats and snouts

aristos, and so on; the indistinguishables

they drag behind them, slaves.

Neither is interesting, their offerings inadequate.

Five hundred meters up, they

become vague enough to make sense;

higher still is the realm where

one sings, for oneself and the sky, and abstracts the world.

 

 

 

 

 

The New Owner

 

He spoke with neither

the sing-song nor monotone,

drawl, compression,

nor any of the body language

of power. He assured the staff that everything

would go on as before;

nothing would be remodeled, no one fired

or hired. He told them

except in extreme emergencies not

to talk in his presence. They could talk

to each other, but not (in his presence)

excessively, unnecessarily.

Then he turned and went upstairs. That first week

a maid broke down and left; thereafter,

nothing. He could often be seen

walking beside the pond, across

the grounds, around

the folly, the now-empty stables;

sometimes he swam

in the pool; someone always watched.

“I feel sorry for him.” No one hastened

to agree or disagree.

“He spent his whole life in the city.”

“Perhaps he enjoyed the loneliness.”

“He may have hated the noise.”

“He’s trying to impose that loneliness. It’s all power.”

“He felt guilty because

he wasn’t among the excluded and now he does penance.”

 

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