I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
Frederick Pollack
poetry
ACROSS THE WAY
​
We think they’re spooks. Young, military;
work at the Pentagon. He said what
they do there, and it was so
technical, fiscal, offhand one had to
suspect. Always working, adding –
the chiminea, hammock,
tomato plant, small astroturf rug.
Inside, she vacuums, including
the neat grey drapes. This is when
they’re not, intimidatingly, running.
No kids, but a dog, who barks as if he’s supposed to.
One’s tough-looking old father
visits, and they feed him.
(Or is he their handler?) Perhaps they just pilot drones.
When the bullyboys come, it won’t be
for them. Perhaps they’ll peer, even dare
to wave as we’re taken; they’re
nice. Some weeknights a candle
appears behind the upstairs
curtains. Today’s a grey Sunday, and it’s there.
A signal?
OLD THEME
​
All places are surrounded –
like galaxies by dark matter –
by ideas about that place,
few relevant except to
the biases that house them.
A case in point, that corner I saw
in no particular weather,
in passing, never stopping,
at the edge of cities.
It’s difficult to reconstruct
what filled that crossing:
nothing burnt and/or boarded –
I would have remembered that –
but the struggling franchise,
vast weedy lots, a package store,
a survivor house cleared
of survivors, a woman
walking. And over all
a certain treatment
of space. It came at the end
of immense districts cruelly sealed
in ideas, and I remember wanting
what I would not find:
a deeper nothingness beyond.
DENEB
​
They get in touch. I’m
ten, twenty thousand
years back. Possibilities:
it’s a sort of piety – they may as well
be pious about me.
They’re chastened, mild, contemplative –
brains changed. They’re almost unimaginably
bad, each thought
and work of so-called art a careful
alibi, a con.
Or else they think in symbols, think that I,
myself a symbol, do too,
and want to show me
shadows cast at noon
by a supernova. I try instead
to see what’s in the light: does it walk?
stand? At least a plant …
But they’re not interested in themselves.
100 times the width of our sun,
it ate up all its hydrogen,
started on its helium,
lived fast, died young,
and this too happened long ago.
THE STONE CANDLE
​
It only works for an intellectual
who mourns and seeks to summon
another. But because it smacks
of commercial mysticism, head shops,
few will try it.
When you do, the results are disappointing.
Squat heavy cylinder, stone
that looks like it wants to return
to mud but can’t.
The wick a stretch of barbed or razor wire.
The effect is that of a disturbing, not
wholly successful sculpture.
Moreover, the directions call
for the spell to be cast in nature,
in a place that has gone back
to nature. You could spend
the weekend in some country b&b but
will that count?
You set the thing among weeds
and say the formulae you memorized,
uncomfortably like prayer.
Some minor demon goes to work,
more prole, you think, than professional;
the wick burns.
As you wait you consider
the connotations of the candle, the
wick especially, considered
as art. What your friend faced
was horrible, of course, but not that way.
As for you, we’ll see.
And he’s there, approaching through weeds,
the face as wizened as it seemed even
in youth, but stone,
the body stone. He slowly moves
a rigid arm and hand through weeds
as if they are all he can touch.
