The Old Spirit
Attendance
Passacaglia
Alembic
Muscle Powered Flight Committee
Cloud
The Parameters
Ozempic
Urn Burial
And the Calligraphy
You hold no attraction –
which works both ways –
for sports fans, cheering stadia.
They want to regress
towards gladiatorial games
with you the funny untrained captive
or lionlunch.
So the film cliché
meaning canceled glory –
bleachers, a field turned night and empty
as cheering fades –
strikes you inversely: they’re
gone, solitude and moonlight
inherit,
but don’t go far enough.
The stadium itself dissolves.
The New World green becomes an Old World steppe.
And day returns as dust
with crowded horsemen playing buzkashi –
a sort of hockey with a headless hoofless
goat as puck. Then they too
devolve, into nomads
contesting someone’s corpse.
You walk among them, smiling;
horses pass through you, or you them;
and the warriors nod politely
as befits a djinn. Their totems indicate
they’re of some Wolf Clan.
The air clears, the waste to some extent
reforests and
you’re surrounded
by wolves. They appear nonplussed, and
hungry. You draw from a bag
some cubes of beef to begin
the civilizing process.
If you have on your desk what Freud called “gods,”
you know they multiply. After decades,
they pass through your hands to be judged, purged.
The transparent orange-and-green wind-up
iguana who can only lumber a few
paces – stays. Also the rearrangeable
puzzle of a city. The unidentified spiky seed
can go. So can the heart-shaped paperweight
with my name that appeared
on another desk when I was born. There are
ambiguous cases: the Swedish unicorn.
Some polished stones with Chinese characters
wishing me things, translations lost.
A tiny plastic collie, abandoned,
picked up, still on guard …
a small thing saved by a small thought.
For a moment, almost all the color
leaches from my mind. What’s left
is blue-white, a white infused
with a different blue, the palest ghost
of an earth-tone, and otherwise
translucency. Like stained glass in
a mainstream church, the sort
that purveys well-meaning nonsense
as opposed to the energetic, vicious
nonsense of the others. Imagine
it more so: the white white arches,
modernist lighting and godlike organ
barely imaginatively serving
to shelter and exclude. And yet
for a moment I’m happy,
for in me the effect
is secularized, the cross reduced to a plus.
From which I can look back
at passion, which wasn’t red but
an accession of flesh-tone; fear, which
was red, for blood, my blood, gracing
tiles or concrete was what
they were after; the black
of space, my first love, which was in
the distance, beyond transparency,
but became somehow close, opaque,
stifling; and several not
entirely negative feelings that
together sport a mild grey; has this
metaphor become too
subjective? So much modern classical
music relies on noise; ten minutes
(or, as with Feldman, hours) of near-
quiet make the point better.
For whom does one write? Footnotes.
It is they who after centuries
of submission tear down buildings to
make squares in which to gather and
announce they will no longer live
among ruins. It’s they who see vivid
and subtle proper colors vividly,
and recognize at last their grief as rage,
while the enemy (who sees nothing
because he has no art) will never
accept the badly needed inverse insight.
What matter if the last flag
is green, not red? If the hymn is drawn
from a text arcane and triple-edged –
one of mine? On May Day night new fires are lit,
new maypoles raised and hung with
the shames and heartaches of my eighty years.
We are told by email to leave the building
by Close of Business. Our Director,
responsible, respected, manages
to contact one of them and say that the lab
isn’t a business and, full of live biohazards,
can’t simply close. The trump she talks to
experiences the rage and
contempt obstruction provokes and vows
vengeance, but allows a few more days.
We’re faced with a choice
of hallucinations. Some find themselves
in verminous robes in stone rooms full
of bubbling stinks and little fires. Some
recall that we’re virologists, and
an illicit cadaver or two
appear. Outside, a mob, hungrier
or sicker than usual screams for
our blood: we have helped the Jews
poison the wells! (A salamander,
something of a mascot, scents
danger, returns to the heart of a flame.) But
the Duke supports us. He is hoping, of course,
for gold; his knights descend from the castle,
and soon there are new corpses. This
fantasy turns out to have been
escapist. Much worse (reality
is always worse) is the vision of
our lab as it will be in a few weeks:
dusty; empty in so many ways.
Only the virus we are studying feels
relief, reprieve, triumph, even
vindication; rising from its dish,
it thinks, I am a being and seek
only what all beings seek.
Muscle Powered Flight Committee
Brian Henry pedaled and piloted
Gossamer Albatross 35.8 straight
kilometers across the Channel
to France on June 2, 1979,
winning for Macready the designer
Kremer’s 100,000 pounds.
After that the Soviets
became interested in man-powered flight.
Six vetted teams competed, though with shared
resources, in a reconditioned hangar
near Moscow. Obvious fantasts
were barred; the pilots
were athletes, the designers mostly military,
which was also represented
(dreams of silent low-flying nighttime
death from above) by bemedaled slabs,
interspersed with KGB
nondescripts. Please smoke outside;
there’s much fabric and glue here. The designs
much alike, the long wing, the cellophane
nacelle, but hers was different:
smaller. No one knew how she
was here; presumably the right papers,
she must have connections. In her
low-cut sleeveless top, in summer heat, with
her tendency to smile, she aroused fatherliness
in some, savagery in others;
a cult of protectiveness formed among
mechanics and pilots, and the rest of her team
(all women, graduates of Tomsk and Bauman)
were tough too. The day came
for trials. 30 meters, 100,
a crash, a creditable turn,
two kilometers. Then she rose,
spurning the catapult. She rose and rose,
circled the hangar and field, dipped,
somehow, her wing, and vanished vaguely westward.
A cloud came over, reducing
the glare, and suddenly I remembered
the dream. Remembered it
the way you do as you awake and lose
detail. Someone I hadn’t
heard from in years –name and image
hardly came up – wrote me.
(Whether by email or rare cursive was
at most a subtext, a sub-worry.)
She wrote that nothing had gone well.
What I’d said about the repairman
was true – “class” difference
(quotation marks hers) – but not just that:
for years she went on excusing his
impatience before she realized she
was being patient. Then came a series of
bad moves and jobs and, unfortunately,
schools for the boy. She found no one
after [name] and had found herself thinking
of good days with me before [name];
we could talk;
in these bad times she longed for my point of view.
I thought I must write her, tell her I’m married,
realized there was no return address and
she never existed. The cloud passed. I
looked out at the coming summer, which –
climatologically, politically, spiritually –
promises to be hell.
The followers of the tyrant
say they hate you
because you despise them. It isn’t true:
they hate you because you know
how despicable they are.
So does the tyrant, but he too is despicable,
and hates you as they do,
and so they love him as they love themselves.
What he does, even to them, doesn’t matter;
they die for a pretense of love.
Eventually you notice
that everyone on both sides
is obese. The necks of officers
bulge over collars, their
faces always red as well as
politically wary. The grunts who
in every war, however technically
advanced, must climb hills climb
slowly, bitching at each step, dropping
stuff from their packs, and generally
fail to take the crest. Bases
and towns provide a spectacle
of sweating spheres. Still one must
take sides, and ours is the decent one:
on the other, if you mentioned fat, they’d
say it’s all muscle, then shoot you.
On ours you’re ordered not to
mock someone else’s culture, or told
in confidence that dealing with these problems
must await the end of the war.
(Which will never end if we go on eating.)
You can think of them as shadows. The status has
been granted them, but between you and me,
in real terms, it’s what they aspire to –
what the whining and grousing, sighs and
repetitive curses directed at
themselves are about, Which you hear
if you listen. But the point is not
to have to listen. Candles, bowing at
set times, the object on desk or bureau
not even recognizable
to others as a shrine – they listen for you.
“Ancestors” plural, to put it simply,
is easier than names, old letters, retrieved
diaries. It worked for hundreds of thousands of years,
still works in many places:
you’re not free, but it gets them off your back.
And sometimes, if you do listen, what
you hear is gentle, almost
forgiving: what they wanted was ultimately
silly, perhaps the same is true of you;
unless of course your wish is generous.
– This may seem strange, irrelevant
advice in these times; I’ll only add that
while Mother died many years ago,
in dreams I’m still remiss in calling her.
Some priests gave us an alphabet.
Literacy became a fad among
the lower strata of the nobility,
the upper reaches of the army. Including
the chief now leading some of us
to explore the land we had conquered,
seize more and then the crown when we returned.
On a remote hilltop we found
steles, deeply worn, more deeply carved
and legible. Our chief and his few learned
lieutenants wept at the perfection
of our language on them. It said they were written
in the twilight of our years, to commemorate
triumphs and insights. Which were listed;
we were there. A tough old general cried,
Madness. If something’s old it’s from the past,
not the future! But the priests declared
that what counts is the mass of years
in either direction; if great enough, it can
account for the cobwebs and rubble around the inscriptions.
The latter have since determined all our wars.
And are responsible for
our attitude: we admit we’re barbarians, the sons of barbarians.
Others try to deny where
they came from; perhaps they haven’t searched
or listened hard enough for their definition.
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 (UCity Review 2013, 2020). Website: www.frederickpollack.com.
