I liked Moi Haissable best of these Frederick, and was struck also by the sad and curious events of Autograph ("not the same plaid, but he had the idea" !).
A phrase in the first poem, "a/c and air" reminds me of some lines in John Forbes' poem Humidity:
"...those downpours
men in one of the city's
two classes - air-conditioned
and the rest - call showers"
Brian
--- On Wed, 26/8/09, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: 4 poems
To: [log in to unmask]
Received: Wednesday, 26 August, 2009, 7:57 AM
In August
It often happens that, a dozen blocks
from anywhere, and suffering
the spongiform invasion of the heat
on corners where maps wilt
and fail, a tourist attains consciousness.
Buses pass, and whether they contain
tourists, or citizens
with homes instead of far hotels,
they teach the universal rule:
division, and the struggle for division.
Between a/c and air. Between those who ride
and look, and those who, legitimately
tourists, subjects, are deposed
and looked at: a new property
of the tour. Between kids
properly stuffed and texting and those
who cry, withdraw, and vomit.
Of course distinctions are funny,
the tourist thinks – not in so many words,
for consciousness is other words;
they go back to the origin
of sexual reproduction, and we all know
what that brought. And when,
at last, the monuments of democracy
are found, and the tourist
seeks the correct emotion, then crosses
them off, words blur and teem:
FREEDOM IS NOT FREE implies
that freedom has a price, the “ultimate”
price, is worth dying for, worth
dying; that death is the cost of freedom.
*Moi Haïssable*
I learn that I offended someone, that something
I said or wrote, some time ago, was deeply
insensitive, but at the time the person
affected said nothing. Now I’m staying
a few days, far from home, with my unsuspected
victim, and the issue, never far
below the surface of the victim,
is ignited by something I say.
I remember the incident, my original
statement, and with an effort
can see how someone could see it
that way, take it badly, but I don’t
see it that way. Overreacting, oversensitive –
I force these thoughts about my victim,
but they’re not what’s important:
what matters is the vast sun
rising again, orange sun of a cold planet
on which I walk amid structures
that may be ruins, traces of other life,
but probably aren’t. I walk there always
though for years at a time
I think I walk another planet, ours.
I don’t say this, of course, to the person
involved, who would only think it proved
my self-absorption, immaturity,
insensitivity, or rather, since they are proved,
that they are unmitigated. Instead
I apologize. I say I hadn’t
understood how my words could be taken amiss,
but now I do and am sorry. And the rictus
of regret and humility tenses
my neck and the muscles of my cheeks
and eyes, though perhaps not quite reaching
the eyes, and I am forgiven.
I have often slept in the houses of enemies.
Autograph
I have it in my LA notes:
a ritual like a dream
at the American Film Institute
on Western, when some minor light
was honored by lesser lights.
(What precept might it have expressed?
*Don’t forget glamor, glamor forgets you.*)
In the vaulting lobby, after
the free eats and the open bar,
a long-faded star
was cornered by two acolytes.
Plaid jacket, trousers; not
the same plaid, but he had
the idea. His more ragged
friend with one of those celebrity
magazines *someone must read
(as some read poetry), tubed, a wand.
And both with blank books bound
in violet suede. Too cruel
it seemed, that those gray
vague faces looked away
from the star’s as she signed. And that hers,
beneath lifts, rouge, wig, seemed much
the same, not looking or to care
if they would keep or sell her name …
But to a dreamer everything’s unfair.
Sail Away
Caliban is glad he wrote his poems.
Though he can only store them
in that terminal file, his apartment,
with other works he has loved
so long they’re his.
Forties paintings by someone
whose name he has in fact forgotten.
(Draftee in underwear loaded
with boots, clothes, forms
issued under hostile lamps.
Workers fighting over want-ads,
primping in mirrors, unwanted.)
Symphonies desperately tonal,
alluding to “peace” already in scare-quotes.
Vast unreadable wistful allegories.
And all about something, all committing
like him the crimes of subject-matter
and humanism. Better like this, he thinks –
if I can just be left alone
to merge with the well-meaning second-rate;
not *die exactly, but withdraw;
to win like the hero of a novel,
a modern novel, who fails. After all,
*Defeat*, said Jabès, *is the price agreed on*.
He is really thinking of the bear in Mailer’s
*Why Are We in Vietnam*?
who, dying of the protagonist’s well-placed shot,
sends out cool woodland vibes,
acceptance. He is not
allowed, however, to go thus;
the protagonist’s father, a plastics executive,
also shoots, and the archetype
turns Kali, not Shiva.
There comes a knock on the wrong side of the door:
he, Caliban, has
the opposite of a visitor.
One of those figures only seen
with vile grins in the act of shuffling away,
whom no contempt nor argument can stay.
(Francis Bacon posed them
at the edge of atrocities.) A smug,
connected, horrid little man
who says, “Your poems try
to *show me something or *tell me something or tell *stories
and I don’t want to be taught or told anything.”
For sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
hum about Caliban’s ears, but sometimes voices
that leave, the last word, leaving
on his walls a David Salle painting:
completely random objects in pastel squares.
Which Salle said seemed,
when he looked at it, so much *bigger
than other people’s work. And Caliban
can see what he meant: it is large –
as large as the brown sky of all outdoors.
And taking a knife to it, as sirens wail
and he loses human form, he thinks
of Death’s cry in Flaubert’s
*Tentation de Saint-Antoine*
(Flaubert views death as somehow manic):
“MY IRONY SURPASSES ALL OTHERS!”
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