Frederick one thing I found here (is it just me??) was the idea of opening
doors in helicopters -usually you throw people out??
Cheers Patrick
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Frederick Pollack
Sent: 28 December 2007 04:53
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: revised "Keep On Keeping On," and "Amends"
I wasn't satisfied with "KOKO" -- people thought I was alluding to one
psyche, Bush's, in the second stanza, whereas really it's the whole sick
crew. And here is a somewhat offbeat new poem, "Amends."
Keep On Keeping On
The three blue-and-white Marine helicopters
pass again
high over the Potomac,
at the level of my window.
One can't be sure He's aboard,
if any of them are, or which they are in,
and of course the birds are fast and armored.
And loud, with that special loudness
of explosions, a tank on one's street,
or guns more serious or at least numerous
than those of the gangs and random snipers.
One goes to movies to get close to that noise,
to be briefly possessed by it,
and to purge pity and fear.
Among the passengers
in the choppers, presumably, the search
continues for acceptance by the father,
continually overwritten by imitation
of the loveless mother;
the triumph of will over an essential
absence of will; the delight
in loyalty, the beauty
of service for their own sake;
the comfort of a cruel joke
agreed in advance to be harmless;
and a resulting freedom from psychologizing, even
from motive. So that doors are opened, phones answered;
and, wherever they land on this gray day,
a fire will be lit . I wonder
what in my small experience
compares. The boss
of a real-estate investment firm
I typed for in the Seventies showed me a prayer
composed by and distributed among
Wall Street honchos. "Lord, have we done enough
this year? Could we have done more?"
I pointed out that "doing" was undefined,
that there was no value-term.
And his look
said my remark
was inscrutable, idiosyncratic.
Amends
When the bridge collapsed, the engineer
tracked down and phoned
a guy he had roomed with in college.
The call at first resembled
the Ninth Step in AA, where one makes amends,
but was more comprehensive and convulsive.
I made fun of you, the engineer said.
Your impracticality, your idealism.
But I've lived to see cracks in the dams, the beaches gone,
clogged rusting rails, E coli
and mercury in the faucets, billions
of gallons of untreated sewage, brownsites
under houses, sinkholes in roads, and people
freezing or baked in blackouts.
I told them the cables were fraying,
that the bed wouldn't hold SUVs.
They didn't want to hear. There was no money.
The Feds laughed. It was my job. I'm fifty.
I buried the memo. I realized
there is no rationality
or rather that everyone's rational, each
in his own short-term way.
Then after it happened I thought of you
and I called to say I'm sorry.
The ex-roommate tried to be upbeat.
He employed the male convention
common when someone calls after thirty years
of talking as if you'd spoken yesterday.
He knew he could say nothing useful.
Was touched that someone like the engineer
would regard a humanities type,
still, as a keeper of values.
He imagined a new artistic movement,
a return to the Constructivism of the '20s.
Scientistic, elitist, slightly scolding,
it would have the quixotism
that guarantees the life and death of a style.
With poems about Wiring or Solar Panels;
a detailed, impersonal
novel called *The Distribution of Stress*.
--
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