Yes, I agree, Fred. It's a remarkably sustained piece of work, with a
stunningly mysterious conclusion--and far from the first poem of real power
and substance (and, as Richard says, "adultness") that you've posted over
the years--Candice
on 2/17/02 8:43 PM, Richard Dillon at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> No one will believe me when I aver that I didn't learn the author's
> name until after I read the poem.
>
> I prefer my titles to Mr. Pollack's; however, I can only tip my hat
> to his adultness.
>
> [Good reading. If you have a book of such work, why couldn't it be
> marketed seriously and with profit in D.C.? I'm not joking when I
> say that this is the kind of work I'd expect a U.S. poet laureate or
> inauguration bard to have written. This doesn't float about a room
> and isn't the stuff of Hallmark greeting kards.]
>
> Richard
>
>
>
>
>
>> I've never gotten much response re my longish narrative poems, but I
>> think the form is more suited to bio. and autobio. material than the
>> lyric ... At any rate, this is my most recent poem and my last sub. for
>> this project, which I think has collected a lot of good work.
>>
>>
>> Neighbor's Blues
>>
>>
>> "Not even the usual failed novel,"
>> he said with a rare, vague smile,
>> his eyes, as always, elsewhere. Only
>> some sort of newsletter, making
>> financial data handy
>> for State Department decisions or vice versa
>> for thirty years. The information, as
>> he often said, was there; but you had to funnel
>> (exhaustingly) his edgy constant drone
>> towards scandal, secrets, institutional
>> denial when you met him,
>> by chance, in the park, and talked an hour,
>> or accompanied him to the library where,
>> towards the end, he worked.
>> An old man's voice and vest and tie
>> though Stan wasn't old.
>>
>> We invited them once, him and his wife
>> (ex-wife, it turned out), Ilse.
>> Swiss; in good shape; taller. She
>> had worked, but also had money.
>> Beyond their plate-glass windows facing ours,
>> a room that might have been inviting - late-
>> Kokoschka-looking alpscapes, tiles from warm places;
>> the only mess, the paper, gone by noon.
>> She spent most hours in her garden,
>> creating miniature gravel paths.
>> The dinner didn't go well - Stan
>> chatted; periodically,
>> Ilse, not impatiently,
>> would interrupt and, with her pleasant accent,
>> briefly respond to things we might have said.
>> - His look when we said, "We'll do this again soon."
>>
>> One topic in those accidental
>> meetings around the neighborhood arose
>> once, and his delivery
>> was spare, though as mild as usual -
>> except when it came to the kid. But the girl
>> was mentioned first, though not, of course, explained.
>> A temp at the newsletter.
>> One pictured a community-college
>> graduate with chaste sweaters,
>> sweet pained voice and grammar,
>> or someone with spiked hair and secrets;
>> probably the former.
>> The only facts stated
>> were love and that
>> she hadn't been pregnant
>> when he divorced Ilse and married her.
>>
>> They lived in Silver Spring. He was good
>> about, and almost got off
>> the track to explore
>> the economics of suburbs:
>> what put the gentry here, the losers there.
>> And schools: he was trying to provide
>> the best from the start, commuting
>> to work and a second job. (Took out,
>> not breaking stride, a shot of
>> his daughter; it was ten years old and faded.)
>> And the washer-dryer, the hundred problems
>> the girl, who stayed home
>> with the kid, was supposed to solve.
>> The low-rate workmen true to local folkways,
>> servile to bullying, brutal to weakness.
>> She started sleeping with one of them.
>>
>> A neighbor told Stan. "At which point,"
>> he said, "for about a week,
>> I lost it." The experience
>> of driving into that labyrinth
>> of Virginia where strip-malls and
>> aggrieved shacks intersect
>> the lofty, GS-16-and-over complexes,
>> finding the place and waiting
>> (pissing on his knees beside his car)
>> for the dude to return; muscling
>> open the closing door with crazy strength
>> and shouting at the dude, who laughed
>> and circled till Stan shot him in the leg.
>> And staring at laundry
>> (the guy left through a window)
>> for twenty minutes till the cops came.
>>
>> He didn't describe his four years in prison
>> and I didn't push.
>> Enormous detail
>> about the lover's various scams -
>> theft and resale
>> from building sites, substandard substitutions;
>> items a lawyer and, later, a private detective
>> had given Stan.
>> His only aim was to find his daughter
>> or learn that she was well,
>> but daughter, wife, and lover had long vanished.
>> Ilse had visited him
>> in jail, and written.
>> This aspect too was skimped:
>> eclipsed by other matters, or perhaps
>> by now he had reached the library, or his door.
>>
>> We went on vacation
>> and, returning, failed
>> for two weeks to notice he was missing.
>> "He would speak to anyone, dogs, trees if
>> no person," said Ilse,
>> her face working.
>> Pain in his chest, unusual
>> at nine one morning,
>> and he spent all day in his room;
>> at seven began rambling, "the way he did, but
>> different," she said
>> and gazed, like him, away.
>> The ambulance took longer than the cops.
>> She ran outside because she thought she heard it
>> and he died while she was gone.
>> I like to think he howled, or that I would.
>>
>> Since then her garden hasn't satisfied
>> Ilse, apparently - nor
>> a man we believe she knew
>> during Stan's madness,
>> who has also returned to her.
>> She sweeps the parking areas and the lane
>> on either side of which our houses and
>> the neighbors' are,
>> filling us all with guilt-feelings.
>> As I said, she's in incredible shape for her age.
>> In spring, the pollen,
>> in fall, the smallest leaf …
>> the next day leaves return, but so does she.
>> It would be wrong to tell her
>> to get a life, I think. This is her way
>> of doing art, of adding man to nature.
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