Bloody good, Fred, as usual.
Janet
On 28/03/2008, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Diffidence
>
>
> In the sidewalk café that replaced
> the Local Group of galaxies, the old man
> is a striking figure: old
> where everyone else is young.
> They're wise in some worthwhile sense,
> uniformly beautiful,
> kind without strain and immune from boredom,
> but young; while he,
> though hale and quick, is small and lined and bald.
> He seeks no attention except
> from waiters (there are waiters,
> insentient totems of the ambience),
> and sits and sips his tea and gazes
> at the ambience, which alternates
> between sublimity and loveliness;
> the marble leaves, the liquid towers.
> Sometimes he reads an old thick book
> that seems to wait wherever he may sit.
> And when he shuts it, sighs,
> and has peered absently awhile
> at paradise, some few
> of the young approach and ask
> politely why he differs so.
> He shrugs. "I was the original
> creator. It's hard to explain
> how naïve I was – I thought
> the idea was enough. I didn't
> imagine causality, violence, death
> or boredom, or really even matter,
> and so was easily deposed.
> All I could do was record.
> He who usurped the Usurper
> and gave you this peace was not I,
> but cannier and stronger.
> Therefore I wear a form that seems to fit;
> uncomfortable, but I'm at ease in it."
> The youngsters stay to chat
> or not (their instincts are exquisite),
> depending on his mood.
> Sometimes he welcomes them;
> some days he spends at other places
> light-years way, among people
> not alien enough to shun the light
> but silent and incurious,
> or unequipped to distinguish faces.
>
>
>
> Moose Jaw
>
>
> It occurs to me that, if we have to go
> into exile, I can't.
> I'm too brittle – psychologically at least.
> I visualize a grandpa on a mattress
> on a cart, drawn by a horse
> or a big family, Stukas overhead.
> He's staring into the Fabergé egg
> of denial and senility, which gives
> no comfort, only an image
> of comfort at a distance.
> Which is silly, of course – we'd drive,
> until the gas ran out.
> We talk about New Zealand,
> if McCain wins. But they've
> been globalized since we were there
> and I doubt they're still so attractively
> quiet and self-effacing.
> Or some gated community in Honduras. In photos,
> the dust around carports
> is a strange reddish-gray.
> We'd learn Spanish finally, and be nice
> enough to the maid to hope
> she saw us as nice.
> I find myself googling Moose Jaw,
> Saskatchewan. Really exotic
> places are those you have no image of.
> It has tunnels where Chinese hid,
> later used by bootleggers, and murals
> of idealized molls and bootleggers.
> And the Klan's traditionally strong.
> – I'd sit on a porch, hiding a gun
> (one bullet? two? a full clip?),
> waiting for the Mounties.
> No fancy uniform, just cops,
> resenting their FBI liaison
> but resenting us more ...
> Feeling vulnerable and old,
> I wonder if McCain, or Cheney,
> undergoes a nostalgia combining that
> of the aristocrat
> for *places, with everyone in his place,
> and the classic bourgeois need
> for endless expansion of the self in space.
> Then I go to our back yard
> to weed. The soil here is terrible
> (DC was a swamp, after all)
> and lawns are bad unless you have real money.
>
--
Janet Jackson <[log in to unmask]>
www.proximity.webhop.net / www.myspace.com/poetjj
The Line Mine, bulletin board for Perth poetry & spoken word:
[log in to unmask]
groups.yahoo.com/group/thelinemine
Breastfeeding info & help: www.breastfeeding.asn.au
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