Frederick Pollack

This Is Just To Say

When we had money, we stopped there,

remember?  You didn’t need

another scarf, but hesitated

over the strangely Forties-modern earrings.

We meant to come back

for one of those ceramic-shaded lamps

with the mildly surreal fish,

and gazed for ten minutes

at the delicate cupboard in three woods –

asking, How would it fit

among the heavy, comfortable things

we accumulated after thinking

our living room would be aluminum and leather?

Nice now, in a way, to go in

to browse, and really only for that – i.e.,

no reason

that can be easily named – as I did

today.  It’s like

a museum when there’s no question of possession;

and for a moment I entered

that slack-jawed, very American state

where everything rich

is admirable.  The decorative salesgirls

were like (I could see it, now) museum guards

or curatorial staff.

Yet I alone was there to ignore

or smile at, and one could almost worry,

the market down for months.

***

The Solitudes

Buildings like mine that year would be

the monoliths of a lesser culture.

A stack of thirty hallways

vanishing in muddy distance;

a thousand strangers huddled alongside

in cooking smells and languages,

few black or very white, wondering

if I was a narc or dealer, shutting their doors.

And the distinctive rot

of mom-and-pops selling generic brands;

the razorwire perspectives;

jogging on line behind seniors trembling

with cold or Parkinson’s …

are there still, somewhere, liberals

who say “vitality” when other liberals

say “blight” and care deeply?

I had my job.  That livid room.

That view of the whole rusty world,

airports.  That scuffed stove, mouldy

wiring, sad tiles and toilet.

A pilot light.

In the Magritte painting, a man sits reading

at a table and is gone the next three frames.

One night, new people were above my ceiling,

or one new person, or a changed

attitude.  Fully alert

at the first sound, I recognized it.

The pause before the next. 

Contained talking and laughter,

not the main point.

Soft, further muffled by plaster.

Then movement, positioning,

movement, movement,

and a slow thunder

of moans, lightning cries, also

muted.  Her cries:

not birdlike-Asian, once

experienced, long remembered; or

some fierce backwoods holler; but authentic.

His bark, almost of terror.

And again and,

ambiguously, towards morning … Had there been,

ever, a long morbid mumble

of bills, or cruel clear words,

the ordinary scrapings, I would have banged

that ceiling.

Instead it became my duty,

my watch, to fight for sleep and fight,

more than usual that year,

the days. 

With only that strange beacon.

Never seeing them

knowingly in the green, scarred elevators.

Straining nightly towards

the near distance

as if bending over a large empty plate.

The ones they might have been – what

did they see?  Beneath the fatigue they caused,

another I could still shake off.

Eventually I moved to Pittsburgh

and found a girlfriend and a better job.

Plato describes a slavemaster

one escapes by growing old.

It isn’t that, exactly; nor can one flee.

***

How I Left Berkeley

My most revealing stories can’t

be told as traditional narratives because

they’re tenuous and disgusting,

and I was disgusting, and the characters

were never actually in one

room together except

the dim neoclassical space

of my imagination, where few are individuated –

Janet, who, during her brilliant at-homes, which

I audited, on Virgil and Narrative, sometimes,

unseasonably, sweated (you saw it on

her upper lip and above

the neckline of her, what else,

Guatemalan blouse), so that one

wondered if it was menopause

(which seemed early), or the speed

she got from Gerald (who supplied

the entire English faculty and

fucked both them and their

offspring of both genders), or Gerald

himself, supposedly handsome

in his black Italian threads, lounging

on a couch in her study, interrupting, quoting, in

his smug nasal mumble, Dante, of whom

he later published another useless

translation (it and G’s deadly poetry

with blurbs from everyone), while she,

Janet, refracted

the rage I once confided

about women in Berkeley who, straight

themselves, took their style and

values from lesbians and constantly

rejected me, into a poem

in which a female harpsichordist played,

continually, imperviously in

a mountain of glass or ice, seeing

which, the figure based on me tried

to break it, pounding impotently, crying –

a poem that, when she showed me it,

occasioned a hatred rather like joy –

far different from the scrupulous, cold

will to definition I showed

at what might be called my farewell party, telling

A that if he ever took power,

I’d leave, because I didn’t want to be

an “engineer of human souls,” but adding he’d

never have power, because he couldn’t

organize a sleepy kindergarten

without faction-fights, and B that

I was sick of helping him hold

the chip on his shoulder, accepting rhetorical

blame for his addictions and irrationalism

to keep his doubtful friendship, and C that

"I'd like to forget about

my penis a while and concentrate

on you,” which she had publicly urged men

to think, they wouldn’t, especially while she

divided her time between gays and rough trade, and

D that her rice-and-dead-vegetable

food was as vile as the pious drone

with which she forbade her son war-toys.

And then walked out into the void.

***

The Founding of Marsport

It won’t be easy.  You’ll have to be,

and pretend to be, one of them.

(And none of them is merely one of them,

which makes the role especially annoying.)

You’ll have to learn math.

I never could.  You’ll have to be

a scientist, not merely abstractly revere them,

as I do to irritate Goddess-creeps

and cultural relativists. –

I used to date a scientist.

Her first degree was in English; we could talk.

I angered her at a party of her colleagues

by talking more to the host’s ten-year-old son

than to them.

(We discussed the X-Man Universe,

Batman, the other great avengers.)

I told her it wasn’t only math

or their evident strain in relating without it;

what I can’t stand is the smile.

“What smile?” she asked, exasperated.

The smile that says there’s an impersonal structure

in which whatever they’re investigating

inheres.  It’s playful, this structure, and hides,

and I’m supposed to admire, not them, but it.

And it (implicitly – all this is implicit)

in turn suggests other admirable, impersonal

causes.  It’s worse than God.

“But structure itself is beautiful,” she said,

and I remarked on our host’s

décor, in which the louche ephemeral chaos

of a dorm room coexisted

with colors and things that were there

because someone had said they were tasteful. –

You’ll have to learn those values and that smile.

Also, you’ll have to sit in a centrifuge

and do thousands and thousands of push-ups

and play ball with the others in the program,

as well as with its officials

and visionary entrepreneurs.

(Which isn’t the only similarity

between jocks and executives.

They have, in my experience, a great inner glow

or voice, which deflects their attention

from things that are neither brief, inane,

nor opportune.)

You’ll have to live in a suit

for days? weeks? underwater

to simulate weightlessness, then train for real in orbit –

the thought of which disturbs my inner ear

and makes me want to hide in a small room.

When all your tests are done,

you’ll have to endure seven Gs

for many minutes, radiation

from the Van Allen Belt and solar storms,

increasingly delayed and staticky comms,

micropunctures, glitches, and the smell

of those incredibly brave philistines, your

Team – until you risk forgetting

that it’s I, not they, you love.

I thought that, once the dome was up,

I’d have you kill them while they slept.

You would then be alone.

That solitude, and your death

(whenever you liked), would repeat

in improved form my own

many years earlier.

Then I thought, What’s the point? they’ll keep coming.

And however monitored and conformist

they are, a solitary walk

(in sight of base) on those sands

should be permitted.

The same might hold for poetry.  During training

you’ll have to conceal your taste for it

(they’d think you queer), but after landfall

some quirks, like beards, may appear.

I even may come to be seen

as a kind of patron

or shepherd of the mission.  They’ll ask you to read,

and won’t understand that I –

not some object in a cavern

beneath Delta Pavonis

or a mummified microbe near an icecap –

am the true alien.

So let them live, and live yourself,

and scratch my closing lines

on a rock that will not be razed

when terraforming and the suburbs come.

Yet I’m unsure whether I want you

to look upon that desert and smile for me,

or this poem’s breath

to thicken that dry air, moisten the land.

*** 

Elegy: Sappho the Cat

 May 1987 – August 2002

Arriving in Heaven, our dear cat

Sappho is proportionately as far

from our first lamented, Homer,

as in the back yard, where I buried them.

But to give her time to adjust,

the distance stretches, and

she cautiously (an indoor life) begins

to explore.  The grass is short,

nowhere too high to see over.

Narrow and pure streams

feed into small, cold pools.

A kind of mouse with an entrancing smell,

high moisture and protein content but no brain

or nervous system skitters here and there,

and is sometimes hard to catch.

Elsewhere, a milklike sap

collects at the base of a tree whose nuts are treats.

By fits and starts, her huge and browless eyes

wide, corkscrew tail

high, belly

(rid of its tumor now)

not seriously dragging, Sappho zigzags,

and as she walks she enters

the realm of understanding.  So that

arriving  at Homer, bouncing

to see him again, and

submitting for an hour to his tongue,

she is glad then to lie

beside his dark bulk

and talk.

“He did the same thing

with you as with me – ” says Homer,

“handed you to them.  And left.” –

“He couldn’t bear it,” says Sappho,

neither accusing nor excusing. –

“He feels guilty,” says Homer.

(It’s hard to know what he means by this, or thinks.) –

“I was crying there, with those tubes,

for days; when he came and stroked me

I didn’t cry, but then he went away,”

says Sappho.  Homer is silent,

and she: “He’ll learn in time

what it is to die alone,”

her tone neither pitying nor vengeful.

They look out at that landscape

which comes in part from a Remedios Varo painting.

There’s a whirligig, trees and caves,

and trout-full streams.  We began as fishers,

thinks Homer. 

Then, far across the sky,

they watch the contrail of a jetliner,

its passengers suddenly sure

they’ll arrive where they’re going.

***

Private Religions

Private religions are the best; they kill

the spirit that needs killing, that

drips poison on creative thought

imprisoned miles below the world.

Where doubt is faith, no one gets hurt

for unbelief.  Your congregation

is other people waiting for a bus,

each heretic and hierophant and martyr.

One who believes she was saved will be saved

from the Boss and Impostor,

the stumbling mumbling man

remember pleasure and his name,

through the efficacious fires of

regret, the antiprayer.

That stupid youth will emerge into reason and order

invisibly, in the twinkling of an eye;

the body (we have stopped at the hospital)

from its cruelties; and the past

from the requirement of forgiveness

(but I have promised this so often

I must rely on death to bear it out).

Light and warmth will return, or, if you wish,

the clarity of winter.  War will cease;

and one who fought for you in every cell,

in the accretion disk of each black hole,

and in the very arteries of unkindness,

will knock on your door one evening

in the disintegrating rags

of preordained defeat, and grin, and say

you never had to take it seriously.

***

***