 |
 |
Damn fine. Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote: Unemployed Elegy The mood of a hand, extended, finding no returning clasp, is that of the unemployed elegy. Soldiers, falling, fall in, because orders, given and taken, make order where there is none. (Their enemies also, shamefacedly, form ranks, unnerved by the absence of seventy virgins and some large, responsible voice.) The multitudinous possibilities of an afterlife, layer upon layer of them, blur into a single lie; and in its milky light, the soldiers recite each his particular – no leave now, no girl; no street cred, returning; no failed farm or suburb; no job, ever – in a flat burst like a serial number, their voices soft and remarkably polite as they are field-stripped by that milky light. And the unemployed elegy barks unnoticed around their boots, dissolving, like a mascot. Then flies home among the coffins in a transport plane always ironically at its disposal, and thinks it should apply itself to the middle class; which is, however, not a class, and lives in the middle of nowhere – ecstatic (which means “standing outside”), rapt in texture: the leather bucket seat like eunuchs’ flesh, the felt of cubicles despair might stroke, the subtle weave of sheets and grain of pixels, real or unreachable and hence more real … A whore at heart, the elegy would feel pain in these things if asked, but won’t be. Meanwhile, on either side of the border fence at sunrise, the very poor sink back in their crevices; they can’t afford to see or hear this indigent or use its services. So in its usual diner the elegy consumes itself – wondering if its extended hand *was grasped, somehow, by a finger unnoticeably small and sweet that will mature into a fist, beat down the author of all pain and mourning, and, like a good son, make its father obsolete. --------------------------------- Get your own web address for just $1.99/1st yr. We'll help. Yahoo! Small Business.