I'm knocked out by that poem, Fred. The concept, the execution, the voice,
the attitude. One a month until November, please.
Andrew
2008/12/12 Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
> December, 2008
>
>
> The new house adjoining the park –
> with shingles, gables, verandahs, trim
> a rich cream, a feast
> of postmodernist set-pieces – flickers.
> Two gray weeks, unseasonably,
> if the term now means anything, cold
> or warm, must have heralded
> this strangeness, while leaves downslope
> held pointlessly on, then fell at once in no wind.
> At issue is whether that house would exist
> in a just society. The garage, no question,
> could house a dozen otherwise massacred
> people, provide powder-room access
> while they chopped the park,
> built fires in the driveway,
> cooked chipmunks and strays. One would like
> the construction of the house
> to be less flashy-cheap – damp sheetrock,
> warped boards – but if even the rich
> are sold such things, how shall justice be made
> of stone? The current residents
> communicate with an uncertain cosmos
> through lawyers who say their kids are decent,
> one's in law school, and the family
> has paid enough, enough,
> for the right to be left alone.
>
> So it flickers, the house, sometimes there, sometimes not,
> like the car in the driveway, like wealth
> or gas. When it isn't, man isn't,
> man never was; but the hunted
> and hunters among the thick trees lack
> a voice to express their joy. Or perhaps
> it's my mind that fades in and out,
> like some words, like the idea
> of justice? I knew an old man once
> who still nagged at the Purges, the Icepick,
> the Spanish Republic. Lately I
> myself remembered the slogan,
> "Don't forget to smash the state!" –
> its meaning a dried, buried cyst.
> And during the campaign, our friend Lily,
> pushing eighty, volunteered.
> Obama's people sent her to Colorado.
> For six weeks she made phone calls.
> Burnt out one night, she heard herself pleading,
> "Imagine the windmills and clean cars.
> Imagine the citizens' groups.
> Imagine the earth being healed and revitalized.
> Imagine being very proud."
>
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
|