Frederick Pollack

The Flowerpot

First you have to get through

terror and the business,

the culture, of Houston –

as ironclad as any,

though it thinks it’s easygoing:

embarrassed beyond speech

by your terror, hoping you feel the same.

Then last words with your wife and kids

if they can be reached

before you’re out of reach.

Another poem, perhaps at your service,

broadcast online and on CNN,

will make much of those words, make them show

that love exists in the vast universe …

please take that point as given.

Finally, a joke,

created by so thin a layer of your mind

it feels alien, saying you’re glad

you’re heading neither towards the earth nor sun

but will be the first man to reach the stars.

Then silence, static, the business of choosing

between explosive decompression

and staring at your oxygen readout;

after a while you dither into death.

It seems that several Astronomical Units

beyond Earth’s orbit house

let’s say souls.

They sit – do something like sitting –

disconsolately, or stand pensively

as if deciding where to go

or if or how to be reborn,

or drawing at length a bottom line. You try

to talk to them but are still moving,

whether that means you’ve nothing left to say,

having talked with Houston, or no comment yet.

You wonder when the neighborhood will change;

who else there is to meet, and to what end.

Our system seems dingy; a solar flare

and some receding grievous vibe

dispense hard rain, but you

suppose it must be like that everywhere.

Eventually you shuffle off your suit.

Things look clearer. You breathe, in a way,

because it’s a comforting habit. You think –

the verb seems bland but it’s all you have –

of the wife and kids.

Space is a surface, and you understand

how the others, distant now, could stand or sit.

It’s earth, in fact, a rich loam.

You were never much for gardening –

who had time? – but now

you kneel and gather dirt and wonder

where you will find seed.

Daylilies possibly, good in sun and shade.

One-Way Mirror

The glass is washed with our tears, it may even

be made of our tears. The one on the far side

knows we’re watching. Reflection

can’t fool him; he even knows

that we must sit in shadow

to remain invisible. If he had

a gun, one of his many guns,

he’d shoot us. It’s a trick

typical of us that he’s here

unarmed. He glares at the mirror,

raging at constraint, though from our point of view

there is none, and in other moods

he insists nothing can hold him.

Hate sparks him to metaphor: he says

we’re right to hide in darkness because

we live in darkness; he on the other hand

has been saved. A thin, staticky

transmission from us asks

what that means. His response

is to raise his fists and beat the glass,

which shatters. Beyond it lies

a wall. We aren’t there;

there is no we; there are only those

who want to be loved and those who want to cause pain.

Scene from an Epic

The King is outraged by a grating noise

that is not the yelps of the mob

besieging the castle, being dispatched

by arrows, boulders, boiling lead

from the battlements, or greeting

new comrades, the usual starvelings

and opportunists from the countryside;

he knows what they sound like.  This

is the strident ululating buzz

of exaggerated, unhelpful,

anachronistic consciousness, or that

of time itself; they are, he tells himself,

the same.  He resents the fact

that his tragedy, if it is one,

should be absorbed, debased,

by this static.  Which, however,

his counselors – three flatterers, one truth-teller,

one general – apparently can’t hear.

Discussion of the disintegrating

situation has stalemated

but the King is loath to let them go

without expressing anger about something,

which, since it cannot be the noise of time,

must be himself.  “I never wore,”

he says, “these robes with any comfort.

They were too sumptuous and thick and hot

for the gnarled body and straitened soul

you never failed to see when you addressed

the crown.”  As one, his flatterers

cry that His Majesty is the image

of manly power, though forgivably

oppressed by care and treason.  The vizier

stares off like one who daily hears

truths that were disregarded and too

late spoken; the general

is merely embarrassed by this personal

and hence defeatist note.  “When the Queen

was alive,” the King continues

(his voice changed in his ear

from a growl that chimes with the sound he hates

to a moan that is the tonic of that dominant),

“she would convince me I was passable.

It was a function, a spontaneous efflux

of her generosity and beauty.”

The vizier allows himself

pity:  “We have reached

the point at which all love is retrospective,”

he murmurs.  “Perhaps our

policies have lacked a woman’s touch.” 

Necessity is sexless, thinks the general,

silent.  Alarums, without;

has the mob broken through?

Have they brought up siege engines?

Have they perhaps invented gunpowder,

charisma, and a rising merchant class?

No, says a bleeding messenger; the old

stone holds.  “If I had,” the King exclaims,

“the least sense that they represented something!

A new way of life – but that can never be.”

“Their chiefs are as corrupt as we,”

a counselor, bored by excess

of terror into honesty,

remarks.  “They’re deep in debt to us

already and, should they win, will marry

well; you know we are profoundly loyal,

yet each of us has daughters in reserve.”

But the King is trying to drown

time’s laugh-track by reflecting

on kingship: “We are paid to be, not do ...

We care, but that is part of being, not doing.

Someday a man will sit in this chair

and house because he bought them.  Other men

will see him as a pure function

of greed and calculation;

yet alone here, at the pinnacle,

he too will only pride himself on being

unhappy.”  Which deserves at least a pause,

he thinks, but war allows none;

one of the six men

uses the word “abdication.”

“I must confer with my son,”

the King sighs, tonelessly.

                                                The Prince, meanwhile,

high in the castle, is representing

art.  It might sound difficult,

given the limited resources

of the time, to draw the sentimental sneer

of individuality upon

faces defined by caste, or carve

the clouds of piety into a stone

of irony, on which, henceforth,

the world will turn; and yet

it can be done, he’s doing it. –

Emphasize, don’t evade,

the diabolus in music.  Paint

the little horses peasants carve

for their kids or, in some way, themselves

in new, “unnatural” colors.  Retrain

the chroniclers – not for accuracy, that

would be too harsh – but for its gray

distinctive sound.  In the churches,

aggressively conserve the mural a nameless,

half-mad folk-painter made of the Plague;

and on the cross above the altar

replace the termite-ridden, fainting Christ

with one whose eyes are inscrutably open.

Of his own work – as opposed

to that he supports or even

inspires – the Prince,

in his remote apartments cushioned

by stone and soldiers, iron and the moss

of dungeons, says little;

is reluctant to show or see, reread

or hear it; yet it grows

louder than battle, more immanent than doom.

He has forgotten whether

he plotted with the leaders of the mob

to seize and/or to redefine

power.  And if visionaries

perceived him as the secret king who sleeps

in hidden woods where justice lives

like bears and periodically awakens,

the metaphor no longer

excites him.  Betrayal is love,       

he thinks, and I love my father

far more than any cause, or any ideal –

save that of Zeno, who says

the battering-ram will endlessly

approach the gate before it strikes;

the enemy never reach

my room because they first must cross

half of the distance, then half of that

forever … The one philosopher

who ever spoke my truth.

And that, perhaps, of Father,

who even now is hurrying here

to embrace me and to weep

or, admirably, laugh,

and sit upon my couch, his wizened

fingers clutching at his crown.

“Father, why do you laugh?” I will ask,

and he will say, “There is only one joke,

my son: the profound,

remarkable one that we are breathing.”

And I will tell him I have been a traitor

since birth.  And he will say that every child

in every kingdom is disloyal,

a rebel, till death negotiates its surrender.

Or else he will enjoy, like a flavor

now seldom tasted, rage; and, gesturing

beyond the trembling walls, demand

what I had felt in common

with victims sullying everything they touch?

And I: “Because I never wanted,

I thought, to be a king, I thought

that I must be a victim.”  And he,

humor restored, will say

that in his own way he had been an artist.

Beyond which I can imagine

nothing until – per impossibile –

the masses come, triumphant, solving nothing;

merely intensifying that crisis which,

because it never happens, never stops.

© Frederick Pollack

///