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POETRYETC  July 2008

POETRYETC July 2008

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Subject:

3 poems

From:

Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc: poetry and poetics

Date:

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:44:27 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (120 lines)

Over a Beer


The generator of destiny
is indifferent whether
it is itself a mind
or a system, past or future.
It creates a series
of mirrors, and assignations
with mirrors.  It arranges
delusive meetings
and models of the essential
meeting.  Whatever
Christ was, for example,
is disappointing: a user,
a taker.  More recently,
the decay of democracy
demands one invoke it
everywhere, saying
*There is no destiny, only
lives* – which is silly.
The crank without destiny,
the poor who might have had destinies
had they been rich are no argument
against destiny.  And a Friend
isn’t someone who asks me
to “follow him”; he’s *unequivocally
on my side*.  I hear his defense of me, feel
his supportive fists approach
the murk of this place and its voices;
if he can defeat them, I’m real.




19th


Thai, Szechwanese and Ribs
compound a scent that soars when trucks,
the stilled and seething trucks of five PM,
move.  It disturbs,
even inside the copy place, a guy
who brings his three hundred pounds out
for a smoke.  Also black,
and big in a different way,
a beggar is returning
towards Dupont.  His spiel
(“I know how to say Thank You!!
I served in the military!!
Help the homeless!!”), though repeated many times,
brought him no joy this afternoon on K.
It’s hard to decipher,
except for the salutation, what he says,
loudly, through laughter,
in passing to his impassive brother.
At the corner of N Street, glass
and concrete yield to buildings,
pastelled, beshrubbed, secure,
that were houses a century ago;
as if each go-getter
had left his slaveys, nanny, wife
and kids for the office, which returned.
Now lawyers descend
for drinks, a meeting, and later
ribs, Szechwanese, or Thai.
The men are as jacketless
as their careers allow;
the woman so blondly beautiful
(more in angles than curves) and laughing,
that a minor Saudi princeling
at an outside table
envisions her beaten, swaddled, asking
*permission.  The beggar
who served in the military wonders
if a certain image can even
be imagined.  Not in this good world.



Dream Before Sleep


*I’m leaving*, the rich man (the richest, actually:
Dives) subvocalizes,
*to become Lazarus*.  His private
Artificial Intelligence informs him
he’s confusing Luke 16 with John 11.
*Whatever.  As the great door closes
behind him, his dependents fold
swiftly into one dimension,
a point on a screen, which goes out.
He admires the profound emotion
accompanying the thought *They felt no pain*.
Some workmen are painting his flagstones
with a barely material polymer
that sheds acid rain.  Illegals,
they murmur with that famous old-
world politeness.  Taking a last breath
of autumn, he thinks how they’ll die at their post.
As he crosses his lawn, the grass dies.
As he enters his woods, the leaves fall,
his remaining accounts are liquidated, the liquid
flowing into the most arcane of instruments.
For who knows?  *Non omnis moriar*,
his AI contributes, and translates.
An elevator opens in a tree.
Dives descends.  The tree vanishes.
At the end of the shaft lie a bed, a pill,
and machines.  He wonders what he’ll do
eventually with resculpted continents,
under clean skies and undoubtedly new
trees.  He isn’t worried
that others will inherit, or if so
that they will have no use for him.
For business inheres in number
and number in nature itself.  I began
as a numbers-cruncher, he thinks fondly,
drifting off.  Start again at the bottom … 

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