Desolate, grand - thank you for this Frederick -
I particularly liked parts 1, 2, 4 and 6 - part 4 most of all, tho something about the very last line of part 4 bothers me
Brian
--- On Fri, 18/6/10, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: "Agents of Refusal"
To: [log in to unmask]
Received: Friday, 18 June, 2010, 12:12 PM
Agents of Refusal
1
They know what I do
but have no way to discuss it –
no routine questions or sympathies,
not even a viable setting
for their faces. No clue.
And if I bring it up
I’m in the position of someone
who tells a joke, then has to explain
its mores, diction, double entendres,
social context, then go back to explain
why it’s funny, meanwhile smiling.
No wonder they think I’m dour.
I might as well be a hitman.
Through the murk of an aquarium
one gets a faint idea of them.
They only appear edge on,
like rubbery moldy pancakes.
Their habits, which one reads about, lack charm.
The lights on their undulating
circumference suggest language,
but when we (scientists) decode them,
all that they ever say is Look at me.
2
Years ago I brought someone home,
my home poor enough,
but with light and food and bars
against the ruined world outside.
Which was why
she looked around tenderly.
Or was it her place,
myself shy
at relative wealth and delicate things,
and conditioned to be nice
though expected, in this case, to pounce?
Yet the world was ruinous
and brought us together wherever,
however. I said she was beautiful;
she knew it.
She said I was kind,
gentle, the sort of thing guys
take under advisement.
A candle burned on the table
as if for Doctor Zhivago.
All that month there were tears, sighs
I half forget,
as one does the wolves roaming
the snows that must have preceded warming.
3
A water buffalo sleeps in the mud
of a rare waterhole.
A Komodo Dragon three miles away
tastes the air, approaches.
The buffalo wakes. The dragon circles.
The buffalo could crack its spine with a hoof,
but the dragon – whose mouth,
even apart from the poison,
is one of the most septic spots on earth –
gets in one bite.
Weeks pass. Mad from headaches,
nausea, flies, blood not clotting,
the buffalo looks one last time
at the dragons, of which there are now ten,
as they close in.
The feelings one could read into that glance
are a quality of the mammalian eye.
4
None of the men or women seized
in the raid on that crack house
claimed or could account for
the baby.
Not of their race,
clean, neatly pajama’d and blanketed,
asleep amid infinite possible harm,
it exerted a pull
on both detectives on the case. One, an agnostic,
resolved to check that Children’s Services
found the kid’s parents or better ones.
But when footprints, fingerprints, fibers, DNA
led nowhere, the other detective, a Catholic,
decided something strange was going on.
The couple who adopted were rich
and loving. And the boy was no trouble,
never crying or acting out.
In school he flourished without bullying or noise,
was chosen for teams, did his work
well, without provoking jealousy.
His teachers observed that other kids often
sought his advice and fair judgment.
The Catholic detective, now an uncle,
doted on, and tried but failed to spoil
the boy. Took him fishing – the kid threw them back –
and to games the kid watched with polite interest.
Often, though he put off mentioning it,
he imagined his nephew
graduating Police Academy,
and more privately pictured him
entering the priesthood, and who knows, someday ….
Conceive, then, the detective’s horror
one day when, slow and retired,
he found the youth in the darkest of holes,
hugging his knees, near-catatonic,
mumbling, “There was no mother.
One can’t exist without a mother.
I don’t exist.”
5
There are lines of sociocosmic force.
A century ago, Theodore Dreiser
sensed them intersecting
somewhere in his apartment. He lifted his armchair,
moved, put it down, sat,
moved it again all afternoon.
No mere writer, however, could introject this power,
and since that time the vectors have often moved.
They meet now in a gully in a desert.
Bands of Salafi-nihilist killers,
for which the region is known, are real enough,
but are also inadvertent sentinels
ensuring that this grail is hard to reach.
Those who convene there are not delegates
but avatars of all the world’s true powers.
Stylishly and variously armed,
horribly fit, they obey
the law of ever-immanent betrayal.
May seem to be negotiating shares
of drugs and religion and oil,
but what each agent is after
is to stand in that vortex
of energies before shots come from colleagues
and new bones are walled into the wadi.
The heat of a quadrillion orbiting dollars,
the bracing mephitic air
of general mistrust, the mind
layering its own impotence
as high as the near stars …
No, it is given to no artist
to experience these essences,
and those who make the sacrifice
believe they die as acolytes and heroes.
6
Benches as worn as those who sit.
Dustmen arriving to clear
paths of refuse, not dust.
Aspens bowing
stiffly in a breeze
like a long sigh between stanzas.
No vertically mating,
noisy, skateboarding young.
Some in school uniforms,
intensely repressed and brooding.
Stones left in shock
when Pickelhauben, shakoes, Stahlhelms,
Budenny helmets rode through.
That would do
for me. Papers always in order,
never requested,
I would rise in slow stages,
leave in slow stages
through the hush;
turn at the end of the allée,
give time back
before I vanished.
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