Repast

Though the Duke dines alone,
the other thirty places are,
as always, freshly set. And when
the staff have retired,
ancestors from the portraits
along each stair and passage come
to greet the Duke again. 

The earliest-limned berate him
for impiety. The wit
of a later age is marshalled
to mock his lack of it.
Frock coats attack the mess
he has made of their finances, while
they all enjoy the wine of nothingness. 

Sunset on crystal gleams.
“Near the docks today I almost bought
a seascape,” says the host.
“A tourist snapped it up.
Real talent there. A street scene,
some modern stuff … I wasn’t
sure what I liked most.”

You Open Your Mouth

You open your mouth for small talk and what
comes out, surprisingly coherent, isn’t
the worst thing you’ve done – you’ve done little –
but your most repressed intrusive thought, then
your ugliest fantasy, followed by two
remembered actions that were pretty evil
and one you thought you’d forgotten. Your tone
is as flat as if someone else
were dictating, your only
emotion horror that you’re saying it, and when
you’re finished, that you did. With a horrible
attempt at a smile, you wait for your friends
(who sat through it all) to flee or read
you out of society. But when one, then another
attempts a reply, what
comes out are their equivalents – worse
(you’re relieved to think) because
they actually did things.
By evening, ill-produced news shows (the anchors
shaken by what they said, which was edited
out) reveal that the condition
is general. Coups are occurring; speeches, classes,
presentations are canceled. Churches fill,
then empty. Hospitals treat mutilated tongues,
many failed suicides. Cops
approach long-pursued now-identified serial
killers, but arrests become difficult:
confrontations resemble therapy, the tone
changes. By Friday divorces have swelled,
but by then the Silence has descended, and
the spirit that has long suffused
our civilization reaches another level. 

As for me, I retreat further into my work.

The Nature Preserve

Arriving on the island, I flee the tour
and start uphill. The plants with their metal tabs,
all shades of green with the occasional thorn,
hail from the entire temperate zone,
which no longer really is, and some are suffering.
I look forward to the exotics, no doubt flourishing
in their greenhouse, a kilometer east.
Must confess I’m more intrigued by
what seems a former administration building.
Why closed? And from what era, which regime?
Imperial pomp, bourgeois begrudgingness
coexist beneath the boards and vines and dust. 

Where two paths cross, one of the famous
peacocks turns in a circle; pecks, threateningly,
the air; spreads his tail. The effect
in this vague spot is like a Hindu temple.
Does a hen lurk in the long grass, or behind
those pines? Perhaps he’s just rehearsing, or
they feed him more for entertaining
us. A couple from my tour appears;
they have long struck me as being like him,
though without comparable grounds
for vanity. We nod, smile stupidly;
he shakes his tail and treats us to a scream. 

One is never quite out of sight
of the city here. Reaching the greenhouse
I look at gaudy things that grow
on other living things. Then from a bench
I watch the ships and distant cars, attempt
to make out natives, think about
experience: how one is never far,
even in cities, from nature, and
how ruin hovers over both.
One achieves distance by distraction;
then, reconstructing self through memory,
configures what one can of life and earth.

Author’s Biography

Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Three collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023). Pollack has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc.  Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review,  Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.