Frederick
Pollack
Steps
of Unknown Towns
The former dome
is
worth a visit,
as
are the nearby
National
Institute
and
Museum
of
Compassion
…
flag of
Estonia
white and storm clouds
or of
Scandinavia
You Are Here
or
Canada
roadsign
and those eyes, brooding
over their inventory.
The
American myth
of
ever-receding
horizons
is
incommensurate
with
mature
economies.
Backpack,
mouth of embarrassment
epharisto,
scusate, Arschloch
Yet
there is always pilgrimage
and
a goal to pilgrimage
although
not the pilgrim’s.
For
the Memoirs
The windows were steamed –
because
the mother (I assume,
had
to assume
it
was a mother) liked,
needed
for some reason,
the
heat. Or had been cooking,
but
I don’t remember
smells.
The
big
plate-glass windows
were
steamed, dripping,
and
before them sat,
on
vinyl chairs,
four
teenagers –
children
older than I –
sleeping
and smiling.
Mother
said, did what was needed
with
the other woman and
we
left. If I mention a
lime-green carpet,
or
the curve of a table
intersecting
the future
or
a lucite object
englobing
it, I embellish.
Something
was crazy.
Cultures
must have,
like
people, their ghostly doubles.
Is
what followed sane?
The
Defenses
First year after girdles,
but
still the industrial bra –
mostly
(as yet) extrapolated
beneath
her black turtleneck,
considering
grimace,
soft
dazzling hair,
and
impulsive progress through the dialectic
(Sargasso
of American exceptionalism,
reefs
of naivete),
as
we walk from the late-medieval fortress
to
the Renaissance docks
of
her strange, precise city,
within
capitalism, sniping at capitalism;
each
moment an intimation
of
feminism,
or
an apparent steamy promise
of
submission
in
the ahistorical forest,
where
I identify (already) with the geese:
I
could fly like them to the ice fields,
but
there I would dream of her.
She
never existed
and,
free of all regret
(mine
only?), comes
to
the end of the path –
where,
briefly confused
by
the absence of trams,
concern,
order
and
social-democracy,
she
shrugs contemptuously,
sticks
out her thumb,
and
demands to go
where
the dancing is.
“When
I have fears … “
Not in a clinic
this terror
of ending unbegun
merely
in time
whose machinations
pass like stones
Draft
As in painterly days
one
slept
on
cushions, dropcloths,
among
ashes, dust,
the
smell of oils
and
turps, to
corner
(away
from the thicket of excuses)
an
image – so
I,
at dawn, waver
from
john to screen,
evading
impediments
of
desk and floor,
foregoing
other
light
to meet
the
unexcited word or self,
the
affectless other who is the truth
