I like this poem very much, Frederick, especially the
last stanza and the earlier image of the still hated,
long dead nuns (with which I can certainly identify!).
The poem as a whole is exemplary for its tone,
beginning with the title, it seems to me.
Candice
--- Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The Unpleasant Man
>
>
> For a change, it isn’t his usual
> ice-caps melting, species dying,
> the fast-approaching deserts
> and savagery. Which fill (he fills) us
> only with irritation: we know all this;
> he uses it somehow as self-validation.
> Shouldn’t he more properly
> cherish and add to our moments of weary
> comradeship (those moments which
> alone are civilization),
> making of each a kind of eternity?
> Instead he raises his eyebrows
> as if amused, and cites
> statistics that, however accurate,
> will deaden thought before disaster ends it.
>
> But tonight, almost mercifully,
> he proclaims a seemingly
> more willed and avoidable doom: the Religious Right,
> Islamofascism (he says he likes
> the *sound of the neocon term, which makes
> us flinch). Bad things, we agree;
> yet he goes on to say
> that something good will come
> of the coming religious wars:
> the definitive end of all religious nonsense.
> Of God. So that our heirs,
> the great-grandchildren of survivors, when
> they sit again with friends will know the worth
> of wine and friendship and be satisfied
> with science and mortality and earth.
>
> Which sounds ingratiating, if
> rhetorical, and we might be appeased
> in advance; but he provocatively stops.
> Unusually uncomfortable
> (more so than if extinction were on the table),
> we gaze through various objective and subjective
> windows. At our faithful cars,
> our costly, well-deserved, embattled peace.
> At long-dead nuns we love to hate.
> At moments in a cathedral
> or in some national park
> when chatter fell away, and
> as if in a new act
> of an unconvincing play, some added props,
> candles or stars, expanded our perspective.
>
> Apart from which, not quite admitting it,
> we each retrieve or fall
> into that secret afterlife
> where long-abandoned dolls will talk and cats
> return, and mothers give up all
> their secrets like the sea, and love
> apologize forever in detail –
> a far more poignant private sacrament
> than the idea of sitting here someday,
> not even as ourselves, but wiser strangers.
> So that our friend, who smiles as if he knows
> what we are feeling, faces something
> like an unspoken hurricane that blows
> from the Gulf into more and more northerly states,
> disintegrating as it goes.
>
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