I enjoyed this poem, however I worry about the capitalisation of He; i
know who he refers to, but I also think the capitalisation kinda plays
up to the conceit that "god is in the whitehouse", not a conceit I
would wish to reinforce. I don't think the he needs to be capitalised,
the blue and white Marine choppers are enough, I think, to announce
his dull presence.
Roger
On Dec 28, 2007 4:53 AM, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I wasn't satisfied with "KOKO" -- people thought I was alluding to one
> psyche, Bush's, in the second stanza, whereas really it's the whole sick
> crew. And here is a somewhat offbeat new poem, "Amends."
>
> Keep On Keeping On
>
>
> The three blue-and-white Marine helicopters
> pass again
> high over the Potomac,
> at the level of my window.
> One can't be sure He's aboard,
> if any of them are, or which they are in,
> and of course the birds are fast and armored.
> And loud, with that special loudness
> of explosions, a tank on one's street,
> or guns more serious or at least numerous
> than those of the gangs and random snipers.
> One goes to movies to get close to that noise,
> to be briefly possessed by it,
> and to purge pity and fear.
>
> Among the passengers
> in the choppers, presumably, the search
> continues for acceptance by the father,
> continually overwritten by imitation
> of the loveless mother;
> the triumph of will over an essential
> absence of will; the delight
> in loyalty, the beauty
> of service for their own sake;
> the comfort of a cruel joke
> agreed in advance to be harmless;
> and a resulting freedom from psychologizing, even
>
> from motive. So that doors are opened, phones answered;
> and, wherever they land on this gray day,
> a fire will be lit … I wonder
> what in my small experience
> compares. The boss
> of a real-estate investment firm
> I typed for in the Seventies showed me a prayer
> composed by and distributed among
> Wall Street honchos. "Lord, have we done enough
> this year? Could we have done more?"
> I pointed out that "doing" was undefined,
> that there was no value-term.
> And his look
> said my remark
> was inscrutable, idiosyncratic.
>
>
>
>
> Amends
>
>
> When the bridge collapsed, the engineer
> tracked down and phoned
> a guy he had roomed with in college.
> The call at first resembled
> the Ninth Step in AA, where one makes amends,
> but was more comprehensive and convulsive.
> I made fun of you, the engineer said.
> Your impracticality, your idealism.
> But I've lived to see cracks in the dams, the beaches gone,
> clogged rusting rails, E coli
> and mercury in the faucets, billions
> of gallons of untreated sewage, brownsites
> under houses, sinkholes in roads, and people
> freezing or baked in blackouts.
> I told them the cables were fraying,
> that the bed wouldn't hold SUVs.
> They didn't want to hear. There was no money.
> The Feds laughed. It was my job. I'm fifty.
> I buried the memo. I realized
> there is no rationality
> or rather that everyone's rational, each
> in his own short-term way.
> Then after it happened I thought of you
> and I called to say I'm sorry.
>
> The ex-roommate tried to be upbeat.
> He employed the male convention
> common when someone calls after thirty years
> of talking as if you'd spoken yesterday.
> He knew he could say nothing useful.
> Was touched that someone like the engineer
> would regard a humanities type,
> still, as a keeper of values.
> He imagined a new artistic movement,
> a return to the Constructivism of the '20s.
> Scientistic, elitist, slightly scolding,
> it would have the quixotism
> that guarantees the life and death of a style.
> With poems about Wiring or Solar Panels;
> a detailed, impersonal
> novel called *The Distribution of Stress*.
>
--
My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
"And we're slow to acknowledge the knots on the laces
heart it races"
Architecture in Helsinki
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