Four Poems by Frederick Pollack

Edge of the Scene

A cat and a crow at the edge of a scene
of devastation. Slim pickings, thought the crow,
some feathers singed. The cat was trying,
rather hopelessly, to clean herself. “Don’t you
intend to stalk and try to eat me,” asked
the crow, “your tail a tell, so that I must hop
and fly away, too tired even to taunt you?”
“I ate a mouse a while ago,
but it was as poisoned as everything here.
It’s likelier I’ll have to hide someplace
where you can’t get my eyes.” The crow nodded
or perhaps only pecked. “Will you pray?”
“We’re not in the habit. – Weren’t,” said the cat
coldly. “We are,” said the crow.
“It’s most of the noise we make, which now may be
the loudest living sound. Collective thanks
for scraps; imprecations. But I’ve thought about these issues.
Reality is just one thing after another.
Contemplation in itself is a kind of protest
that fear warps into prayer.”

Delta

He has some reason for being there,
and reason is enterprise.
But it isn’t clear from this distance
whether the one man
getting into the one car
on Main Street is black or white.
It’s likely he doesn’t see himself
as a survivor, unless of some private past –
one must always look forward.
Or in any sense a witness,
except of luck or Jesus.
He drives off. There are no boarded
windows, no windows.
The Downtown Renewal Center
closed, or stopped, at the same time
as the hospital and that
garage. Turns down a street
where one powered house
sits between weeds and weed-grown roofs;
passes
the two functioning mansions –
well-mowed, though someone
must go or send someone
twenty miles for food;
on his way to the next town, where
there’s at least a bar, and flags
at or near each corner.

Marginality

Peripherally the jungle
is real enough, vivid and grim
(“Everything in the universe,”
said Santayana, “is food for something else”),
but when I look it’s paper,
origami snakes. The bulldozers,
and whites with guns and economic/racial
motives who have driven
these people onto my desk,
are real. I pull out membership cards
affirming my contributions and
concern, and try to show them to
the tribespeople. Accustomed to
hallucinations and, now,
madness, they don’t
see me as a giant but another
white, weaker than others and absurd.
Blowdarts and spears
pass, vanishing, through me. I
suppose what I really have to give them
is the unpleasant laugh
I’ve heard myself use lately when
I remember that everything’s important.
Survivors will echo it
when they cross my desk to wherever they
end up. On the edge of my vision, paper burns.

Small Escape

It’s your duty to try to rejoin
the war effort. But you’ve only
facile popular images
of what to do. A bowl
for digging. Wood lying around
(?) for supports. Earth in your pockets,
imperceptibly scattered
by day. No sleep. Some kind of pole
to pierce the surface of the earth
for air. The guards patrol, stare
from the towers. It’s
always a temptation
to live and let live, follow orders; it’s
such a blessing not to be shot at,
the minimum human right.
And shouldn’t there be others
to plan, exhort, inspire,
help, create noisy distractions above
the tunnel; others in the barracks,
the world? But you dig, sleepless.
A candle shares the bad air filling
the inches before and around. Your
crusted fingers encounter
a bone. It connects, as the song says,
to others. The so-called Beaker People
entered this land five thousand years
ago, but whether to trade or conquer
we don’t know. The bones lead
to a skull, which is wearing a crude
but metal helmet; with
something beside the usual terror
you hold it, though uncertain
whether he is a guard or guardian.



Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.