Frederick, I really like this. (I have just started using third
person... so also appreciate reading this some bit extra again)
On Fri, 2010-07-02 at 00:34 -0400, Frederick Pollack wrote:
> Used Book
>
>
> He’s a composite figure,
> but wouldn’t mind that. Expats,
> poets, wanderers tend
> to be or become compounds,
> and he is all three. Likes ports,
> whether cities or villages. Likes
> to look at the sea from hills
> and then from higher hills.
> Stays, sometimes for years.
> Finds someone unlike the last one,
> and writes about her when he leaves,
> and shows that to the next one,
> who, whatever her language,
> understands well enough. Their contempt
> for him only slightly exceeds
> his own, which pervades
> his work like a mistral. When there’s war,
> he arrives just after or leaves just before,
> replacing “I” with bulletholes
> in walls, stains on stones, and
> the glimpsed emotional life
> of some martyr. In poems, that is.
> Two lines: *Since every bed, now, is rented,
> no one can sleep soundly.*
> Otherwise: his nostalgia for God
> is less than for home or Communism.
> Far from the critics he observes
> the scene with undemonstrative disdain.
> If we met he’d be charming, perversely
> denying received wisdom, that only the poem
> speaks. Of course I speak, he’d say.
> Of course you want to hear *me.
> And would in turn be charmed to learn
> where I discovered him –
> the unlikeliest shelf on earth,
> between depressed antiques and spineless thrillers,
> the discrepancy a measure of our worth.
--
have chronic fatigue syndrome so may be delayed in reply or brain fog weird
just to let you know that's all, Chris Jones.
Blog: http://abdevpoetics.blogspot.com/
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