| I ALMOST KNEW THIS by Frederick Pollack I Almost Knew This 1Love is a pleasant, working seaside town. Strangely, its major industries are neither tourism nor fishing; it lives on gentrification per se. There’s a small dock. Most of the residents came from elsewhere, but are devoted to the place and view themselves as natives. The sea in this allegory is grief. You have a boat, but eventually you sell it; it wouldn’t get you far should the waves rise.2You know that Renaissance etching – a favorite once of hippies and New Age types, still employed as an ad for some transcendence or other: a guy in scholar’s robes and skullcap kneeling at the edge of the flowery, forested world, sticking his head and upper torso through a crystal sphere and gazing with awe, arms outspread, at wider spheres, all sun and stars and light? A good way to get your ass kicked.3I really don’t care, do u? – MelaniaAbsurd and servile to imagine that any member of the 1% (before he pressed the button dropping you from your chair into a disintegrator beam) would describe, coldly, logically, happily, his and their ultimate plans. Dr. Evil works for them, and for him too the point is focus, lack of emotional investment, the short term. The BWA-HA-HA-HAA of cartoons implies the moral consciousness it mocks, which is a petit-bourgeois handicap. (The peasantry, as always, senses this and pennilessly emulates its betters.) Likelier that a master will scurry between his bar and pills, clutching his phone, shrieking batlike at a lawyer. Think also of that disintegrating suet major donor on a wheelchair-scooter accompanied by arm-candy … Tall, stately, lacking somewhat the requisite cheekbones; her thoughts beneath the careful tan as close as we will get to the superman.4A Roger Ballen photo, looking back in part to his photojournalism: decayed white inbred dorps of South Africa, angry hulking microcephalics … But this guy, sitting on the edge of a bed, is chalking on a wall, a foot away, faces. His own, long, pale, and flat, turns jut-jawed towards you; the whites of his eyes show. The faces are small, quite simplified, demonic, crew-cut. He may be prevented by his medium and stylistic assumptions from saying whatever he would about himself and men in general. Or perhaps he is saying everything he wants to say.5And in another Ballen shot (or is this a composite?) the Witnesses, his charcoal cutouts, line the implied walls; they are so used to wanting to be elsewhere they avidly take in whatever happens. Animals and parts of animals, some alive, some toys, help cords and tangled wire define the space (Nature is holes and will go down holes). While on the sheets below, cluttered with other witnesses, mice and a lizard crawl, and from the tangles hands emerge, seeking Yolandi Visser of the band Die Antwoord, who welcomes them perhaps but her hands are full. (She has the sort of beauty that ages well because it’s so close to the skull.)6Others had horses, abuse from their own and other bodies, the self-righteous smell of cows, grandparents, parents mourned and hated from the womb, a “you” who said nothing or went on and on, bourgeois plants whose names I never learned, the joy of signifiers liberated from signifieds, compassionate tourism; I had only my suspicions. By now I’ve forgotten what most of them were, which is their nature and why they remain important. I forgot, above, to mention religious poets, to whom I have something to say. If God exists, he can do one thing for me: when I (who never served, and won’t) ask him to let his servant depart in peace. Near the Ocean1Legendary good-time girls, not sisters (each has one, good, scolding, not in contact) but might have been, shared eye-drops, and make-up for veins in cheek and nose; see themselves both as outriders and moral center of dusty rental complex, an iterated shack, near the World-Famous Pollo Piquante, students, druggies, student/druggies, a teacher, Pier-workers whom they don’t date, holding out for sugar, meanwhile entertaining (themselves with) too-rich-for-but-sequacious-of- the-gangs young Latins, scared, good weed and pills; white wine from morning on, annoyed by a couple staying in illegal bnb downstairs, whose door they adorn that afternoon with tp, markers, then some eggs lying around in the fridge, that’ll show ‘em.2The sliding-glass door always open, no fear of bugs (sometimes flies). On the walkway between the low fence and the beach, tourists look, maybe wave, raise phones, must envy the liquor whose shelves take up most of the facing wall; see also (as sun heads towards China) a jersey, a flag, a medal, some funny- obscene and/or hopeful incitements on posters. And friends, always friends, deployed on a vintage though frayed and taped beanbag indoors, or the balcony. But there’s no question who’s the center, the shoulders still wide as a tank, the belly still vaguely muscled over the trunks (the friends also always about to run towards the sea): the loudest, chin drawn down, neck swelling and red when he laughs and laughs again, I was I AM NOT responsible for everything I saw, so now I see nothing. Ataraxia 1The masters of the world are Pyrrhonists of a sort. It’s indifferent to them whether they appear before crowds (on the rare occasions they must) in T-shirt or their native suit. Someday with equal grace they will readopt togas or thick perfumes. They play golf and read nothing, to obviate infection.Undermasters are not above curiosity and self-display. When the new retail and restaurant complex at the Wharf opens (near their boats), they stroll and eat and buy. Perhaps one enters the doomed but briefly brave bookstore. You might enjoy decoding Language poetry, bro, but don’t mess with me.2At the end I’ll be too busy begging for morphine to think anything, so this passage is a sort of self-bequest. I’ve always despised Kierkegaard (almost as much as his God), but rather admire how at the end he balanced outstanding debts and assets. When the drugs kick in I’ll try to solve, one last time, in theory, my two conundra: how to make fifty, a hundred, at most a few thousand years the metaphysical horizon; and my own version of unde malum: Why is pain more convincing? (They say it isn’t but they lie.) But really at best I’ll think dreamily of love and people and regrets until breathing gets hard. If I’m lucky, Medicare won’t end or my secondary coverage run out before I do. 3Mannerist neck, true blond, stacked. If you were smart, you realized she was out of your league. Few or no signals, but also not the flat affect of a lesbian in that town and era warning you off. Something else. If you were even smarter, you stayed and talked. “When I was thirteen,” she said, “and miserable, a voice came to me in my bed; just a few words, clichéd, forgiving, heartening. I couldn’t tell who had spoken. It didn’t matter; it could have been myself, but not the I who heard. And who decided to go on, and rely on my mind. I went into physics and flourished, despite the obstacles.” She described her work, engagingly, without vanity. Impressed, I muttered, “Art can serve as well.”4The smell and lamentations – distancing word! – of the refugees (not “immigrants,” they won’t be let in) at the end of the lawn is less obtrusive than the sound of crickets, exhausted by their night’s exertions. There is a layer of time between those dirty hungry people and me. It may be just a membrane or thicker than my future, but it muffles the cries of their kids. I feel bad. I walk to the end of the lawn and tell them, “You must hate me.” (They all speak English, still.) “We don’t hate you,” they say. “We’re only abstractly aware of you. Don’t feel bad.” Their voices are further muted by the ministrations of cops of some sort who shoot and stack them, light a hecatomb on the spot. (Intolerable in this heat, their armor focuses their efforts.) “But really, I want to help,” I say – to the refugees, not the cops. At least some Diet Coke, like I give my gardener. Nor Melt Away 1If I had lived a few more years (and why shouldn’t I have? Good genes, hale satisfied centenarian), I might have asked the following: What is time but style? In my youth, I wore the black uniform. Some girls found it sexy, some scary, which gave us a good way of judging girls. (Men in black, it’s well known, are serious.) At his trial, Fat Hermann said that in fifty years there would be small statues of him in every German home – very small, perhaps, but there. He was decades off, and might he have been visualizing bobbleheads? Still … Then Grass, the novelist, briefly a comrade, had someone sing at the end (no doubt trying to surrender to the Americans), The trend is toward the bourgeois-smug. For me it was. Without regret, I abandoned stern nihilism for the jaunty relativism of commerce. Holidayed on nude beaches, accepted my decadent children and perverse grandchildren, even developed some taste, as you can tell. But youth returns.2Griffin, archaeologist of the Anthropocene, masked in the heat against hantavirus, armed, exploring trailers and lean-tos far from towns in southeastern California and western Nevada, found among the drifts and piles a bundle of letters. The rubber-band broke on touch. Neat penciled cursive, school paper. Examinations of feeling, immediate, honest, untainted by literature, detailed concern for mostly implied unspecified problems, heartfelt considerate advice, and hope (not, interestingly, faith) continually urged … Nearby, amidst receipts, bills, tissues and droppings lay some polaroids that had perhaps belonged. Green T-shirt, blue dress, great hanging breasts and armflesh; one of the faces puffy from drink but neither visibly bruised. Looking at them one imagined love as high above the desert as any vulture.3If pain alone is real to us, with violence as its faithful sidekick and attorney, the old saw “Life is a dream” has meaning. Pain is the fuel of the dream, whose work like that of poetry is apotropaic: to deflect pain. That inexplicable crowd one day on Olympic or was it Pico (new discount place?) was obviously dreaming. Driving, whether on surface streets or freeways, is a tense dream. The position of any observer is dreamlike. Shostakovich at the end borrowed the xylophone from Saint-Saens’s “Skeleton Dance” for his own bones, Rossini for an echo of his snide youth. He believed the KGB wouldn’t get him now, something else would; surveillance had been handed off. “Good people on both sides” at Nazi demonstrations dream each other: as pain; as opportunities for violence. The important thing is not to use the word “we” imprecisely, certainly not for humanity at large. “We” in the present case is Santa Monica. When I was sick I went to a hospital. I brought my notebook and three books from the NYRB Classics series, read, sweated, tried to read. They found me a bed. I lay reading, waiting for the specialist. And then I woke up.4An early-morning light-angle where a ceiling meets a wall resembles engineered effects in shots of more expensive houses. She has to go to the doctor. He’ll take her, and wait, though it’s unnecessary (next week she’ll return the favor). Then they’ll shop, at an overpriced chain that has outlived its reputation, but its fruits remain good and they want fruit. Returning, he’ll do laundry and attack the kitchen floor with a Swiffer. (Even to mention the maid who comes bi-weekly could suggest discomfort that they have a maid and ruin the delicate effect.) Then while she cooks he’ll take his evening pills and feed the cat, who is already leaping onto and off the ledge beneath the ledge that holds her treats, not sure that after a lifetime he’ll remember. (It may be sentimental to use the cat.) With dinner, news, as much as bearable, silenced when Trump appears (“That man doesn’t speak in our house,” she decreed and he approves), unless the latest crime has been exceptional. Later he asks what she’s thinking. She’s thinking about the problems of a friend; he, recalling an old article decrying the tendency of mainstream poems to end with bursts of vague philosophy. About the Author:  Author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, 2018). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Manhattan Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Main Street Rag, Miramar, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Poetry Quarterly Review, Magma (UK), Neon (UK), Orbis (UK), and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Adelaide Review, Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, and elsewhere. Adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University. |