Brother George

I wonder now if it was Bush who wrote

my early poems.  He was at Yale when I was,

before women, though a type my type avoided:

drunk from Thursday through Monday

and, when the Smithies were bussed in for dances,

vomiting, sometimes collapsing in their path.

And yet, however sullenly or idly

one sat in class – perhaps especially then –

one couldn’t help but learn the crucial thing,

that truth was elsewhere.  Our rooms

(even the legendary ones

reserved for Vanderbilts and Morgans)

with fireplaces full of beercans,

as cheerless as the company of men;

H. Bradford Westerfield III

each end-of-term projecting

an Omega Point where Communism would fall

(the Company recruiters descending

on those who applauded loudest); Wimsatt and Brooks

excising the poem from the world – didn’t they all

tell us that truth was a distant, possible

woman?  Her sensuality reserved,

her smile of steel; one who would keep us in line

yet unconditionally agree with us?

It is no Atlas that holds up the world

but a frail mistrustful being, all mind, all wrong.

West of Cumberland

Possibly a former tormentor

from school came through his checkout line

and didn’t notice him; or else

the former’s former girl, a former

Homecoming queen; and one or both

had visibly dissolved

into the local slurry:

bloated yet pinched,

still living at home, or nowhere better …

Why else, when work was done,

would he secretly dance

through crusting and unshoveled snow

five gray blocks to his rooming house

and savor his bland rations,

before he lit his lamp and drew

from musty shelf or Web

the Knowledge of those few who know

(Mein Kampf or Revelations)?

His light was visible from the bypass

as we hurried to reach our liberal

friends, the cook, the painter, before

the blizzard.  The slow

colonization effort there

is eager for guests.  But I was

(typically, in the boondocks) wondering

whether among those lights a secret brother,

anomalous in his place and class,

transcended, read; wrote, not embarrassingly …

Through static, Garrison Keillor

lovingly mocked his imaginary

town, himself.  (How many years

of this shtick?  But nothing

else even halfway bearable was on.)

One skit was repeatedly

punctuated by a laugh-winning

“It’s all about you, isn’t it?”  It’s all about me.

Crystal

Poverty is a great inner glow.

– Rilke

My spiritual exercises

are time-consuming:

for much of the day I contemplate victims.

They must be carefully vetted:

too plainly wronged for the right to notice,

too difficult and hopeless for the left,

while for organized religion

they serve their purpose by being always with us.

Poststructuralists claim my gaze exploits.

I agree; my object is my own salvation.

I feel it approaching

when, blind from hours

of watching newscasts, reading bleeding hearts,

and managing, for moments at a time,

to see what they depict, I stop –

not “fatigued” but inert;

the point is contemplation, not compassion.

That inertia is interesting.

Things – a cup, a wallet – are most real then.

Staring from some lately gentrified

café upon a ruined boulevard,

I register the drug-addled

child, the urinous talker,

the feral youths, the woman walking

first one way, then another,

the westering sun diffuse

but intense, the ambivalence

that begins millimeters

away from nerves in pain, and

the aura of these objects is quite bright.

Copyright © Frederick Pollack, 2008