that's a very strong Brazen Head Frederick.
2009/7/14 Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>
> Brazen Head
>
>
> The later Emperors, when they rode
> in triumph through Rome, never turned
> their heads, or waved to the crowd,
> or smiled or spoke to anyone,
> but stared straight ahead,
> as still as crumbling streets allowed.
> Wouldn’t respond if a fly
> dared to land; and wore,
> not the toga of old, but thick, hieratic
> robes held together by gold
> and dirt. For Christianity despised
> the body, and the last Caesars stank,
> though differently, as much as those who cheered.
>
> Of course there were few triumphs then.
> Emperors seldom appeared,
> which made them seem more mystic. But
> perhaps, in the crowd, a veteran
> recalled more human, mobile faces,
> however brutal; and what
> his old scars expressed
> was this: *I’ll starve when the dole stops,
> die when the Goths win through;
> till then I see through you.* –
> Though it may be anachronistic
> to place a modern feeling there, or think
> that, watching, we would not have been impressed.
>
>
>
>
>
> Air Kiss
>
>
> Richard told me this story.
> His mother had chosen
> his stepfather over him. He left home,
> lived and worked where he could.
> Someone gave him a scholarship
> to a Lutheran college. Its ambience differed
> from the Orthodoxy
> of his steel-town childhood – the mild older priest
> praying before an icon-screen; the terrifying
> younger one appearing, never expected;
> the crawling (he could never make this clear)
> through a tunnel
> to kiss a glass coffin – and yet there was something,
> he said, that hadn’t changed.
> He graduated – in English,
> like everyone in those days – but with a
> wordy belief in “service”;
> the one or two friends he had made were similarly earnest.
> The Peace Corps sent him to a desert.
> For two years he distributed
> pills from a shed, lived in back.
> A doctor was there
> between conferences; Richard
> could only supply prescription-holders.
> At first peasants came
> to beg or threaten in their language,
> but the threats
> came to nothing. Local imams were hostile
> but frightened of the Shah.
> For the most part people stayed away.
> From his shed, Richard saw
> rock becoming sand, and sand,
> he thought, becoming stone. The sky was not blue
> but white. The few bushes
> smelled like the goats that ate them.
> In the distance, black objects
> scuttled – women; and at night,
> across the waste, he could hear screaming.
> It reminded him of the songs
> he had listened to at first. Doggedly
> he pursued the language, got as far as some poems;
> they were all about love, and every one,
> he said, was a lie. Landing in
> New York, he took a bus to San Francisco
> where he had, somehow, a contact. It was spring of ’68.
> He met his acquaintance
> in one place, got a key to another
> that was up three dark flights.
> At a table, under a hanging lamp,
> sat a girl. She wasn’t surprised
> by Richard – he had, after all, the key –
> but he tried to explain himself
> anyway. As well as he could,
> exhausted by the strangeness
> of the city, its nighttime urgency,
> the bus, the plane, Iran, and with a feeling
> of deeply ingrained grime. She listened
> or not, not looking at him. She was beautiful.
> Was brushing her hair,
> richly highlighted by the lamp. Richard
> sat in the dark
> at the far end of the table. Waited
> for her to offer him some food, a coke,
> a joint, to take his virginity,
> or perhaps for himself, impossibly,
> to ask. The story ends in this shade.
>
--
David Bircumshaw
"A window./Big enough to hold screams/
You say are poems" - DMeltzer
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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