I think I 'get' 1 and 2 and feel the anxiety of the situations,
but 3 seems more like 'fiction' and I can't yet situate the speaker in relation
to what is told.
But all three packed with life and language life as usual, Fred.
Max
Quoting Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>:
> One or Another
>
>
> 1
>
> We’re broke, and preparing to leave.
> Embassies burn, corporations shred;
> I throw out papers.
> I *do burn my old diary,
> leaving nothing for biographers
> (I have no biography), and sort
> through books. Work down
> to a thousand I haven’t read
> but still want to. They retain
> the aura, the promise that shone
> in long-bankrupt bookstores …
> We quarrel constantly.
> I still have too much, too many.
> And make no progress till I adopt
> a kind of joyless ecstasy,
> as if identifying with time or death,
> whose unwitting spokesperson
> my wife is: practical-minded,
> down to earth. We’ll have no room
> where we’re going. But where are we going?
> It depends, as for millions,
> on the house, how long it takes
> to sell, what risible price
> it gets. We’ll hold hands
> in the shelter, till thieving gangs
> tear us apart in the night
> and beat us ... She begs me
> to stop being hysterical. We’re going
> where the sun is a horror-movie
> monster, humidity a plague
> on the skin. We’ll have
> an apartment deep in the tide,
> swim with the other
> frail Jewish fish. Inland, snakes will ask
> what church we go to, and report
> our inadequate answer
> to their high priest, an alligator
> whose creed is *Blood in the water*.
>
> 2
>
> One night I realized that compassion
> is a full-time job,
> a vocation for which no training
> prepares. I remember the paralysis
> that came with understanding
> there are not tears enough
> (I have not tears enough) and that tears
> do nothing. The sense
> of an irrelevant,
> horrible transcendence. They say ideas you put
> in the mouth of yourself as a child
> are necessarily anachronistic. Mine,
> however, were there. They were what
> childhood was for. We were at some resort;
> I don’t remember where,
> or why Mother went there
> (divorced, in the Fifties, she wasn’t
> supposed to have fun, and,
> I must have made sure,
> didn’t). We were at a long table.
> The floor-show
> was embarrassingly bad, for me just embarrassing.
> In sweaty quasi-darkness,
> another mistakenly-placed
> child, next to me, was asking me something. Girls,
> already, didn’t. I realized
> she was trying to be nice, and to look nice –
> lace collar, dark eyebrows,
> strange mouth, yearning eyes –
> and that she was deaf;
> couldn’t hear the embarrassing music,
> or herself as, for the third time,
> she sang, “What is your name?”
>
> 3
>
> Few sounds penetrate
> the heavy-paneled room
> where the headmaster questions
> the boy. They, the sounds, may –
> one can always deny – be of sobbing,
> beating, bad laughter;
> straightforward gunfire
> would be a relief, for then one could simply
> fear for oneself. The headmaster
> would like to go out,
> he really would, to check,
> but must deal with this troubled
> troublemaker. Who himself might want
> to help were he not
> committed to sullenness, silence,
> even imagining enemies –
> the headmaster – out there
> hurting. The latter wishes
> he had the training
> and leisure simply to help.
> Then there might be
> tears, confessions, a fatherly
> embrace, reconciliation,
> peace – but there is no peace:
> he might have to *expel
> the lad. For the good of the school.
> Invoking abstract right
> and wrong he has to believe in ...
> The room is dark, with endless books,
> the sort of room I love. I wasn’t
> like this kid at his age. Was law-abiding,
> rather timid if anything;
> not hopeful but not entirely hopeless.
> I believed I would die in light.
>
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