Paintings of Texas Towns
Gate of Horn
Rod Penner
They are consecrate to Zeno.
For you would have to
cross half that street, and before that
half that, and so on, to reach
the block-long building, bricks still whole,
windows in place, though transparency may
have leached from them. What it was
(which means whose end it served,
for being, here, is profit) is
an easier question than what it is.
Or where the pavement of the street yields
to that before a row of rusted shutters
(which could have been a problem for police
at some point, or lawyers).
Or how long that puddle, defining
a declivity in the dust of
the road, has been there,
or why one bulkhead light
still shines above what may have been a store.
The question doesn’t meaningfully
arise, however, where people are.
My best ideas come from the edge
of sleep, where financial projections
are doubted, the medical question
tabled, the report on means and ends
returned for editing; where a corrupt yet timid
republic yields with a sigh to a king, who is
swiftly deposed by a shadowy, place-holder
god, who turns over power to
a khan, maddest of rulers, deeply
wishing the good of all yet
given to laughter and debauchery
in his distant, isolated,
soundproof palace … It’s he, who fears nothing,
who encourages promulgation
of world-overthrowing, anarcho-critical
ideas that are entirely suppressed or,
if not, sent back for peer review though
peerless, subjected to focus groups
that never quite focus, are
burnt by reactionary forces and gather
dust for decades in the files of
the standing committee.
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; to be reissued by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson 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), Armarolla, December, and elsewhere. Online, his poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Diagram, BlazeVox, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), Misfit, OffCourse , UCity Review (2015, 2020) and elsewhere.
