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.”
