Two from Frederick Pollack
Hearth
For three years it wasn’t cold enough
to make a fire. Then it was, but when friends of ours
in LA lost everything, we didn’t
want to. Fall this year
is ambiguous. I read articles
about the dissolving Gulf Stream, the descending
Polar Vortex. The iron box
beside our firescreen is piled high
with logs, twigs, cedar strips,
which must by now be very dry
and eager. Perhaps in February, perhaps twice
I’ll be able to indulge
that fancy—that the pleasure of
control has something to do
with what the fire itself
feels. What it would do
to us if it could. Knows it has done. Yet dies
quietly, calmly, the way we’d like to.
In Partibus
Perhaps the new revolutionaries would wear monks’ cowls,
and preach that only purity of means justifies the ends.
– Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
At dawn I think of Kalief Browder, who served
three years at Rikers without trial
for allegedly stealing a backpack and who
hung himself two years after being released.
Helped by study and training, I imagine
as well as I can what he faced
and felt. Then extend my meditation
to the 150 stabbings
that occurred each month at Rikers, and the character
of its rules, staff, lawyers, water,
and roaches. Then, as is our practice,
I think of other places, more recent horrors.
Some of us call this prayer. It’s only memory
and attention; the aim is not
to release or depress, only to focus,
like a list of things to do in a day
that lasts a long time. Then I go down
to the shooting range, and one or another
martial arts class, and only then
to breakfast. Beyond the cleared
area, the guardposts and the wire,
the day as usual is filthy hot.
Citizens of this disputed, “purple”
region walk to what stores or depots
are open, what work they have, and either
make a great show of ignoring us or
ignore us. At one point our main building
was one of their churches. After meetings,
I enter what is truly now
a sanctuary. Two stitched and bandaged
women have been released from
the infirmary and wait, one with her kids.
There are also a battered youth, and some immigrants
who by the look of them have known hunger.
I’ll be here late, evaluating, offering
what comfort we have and initial placement.
There’s also a dude. I know he isn’t
packing but he may carry an engineered
virus, or plan to do
what damage he can with what he can grab.
Or he may actually have had
enough of the lies outside and now sits
looking blankly around, as much
without a settled home as the word freedom.
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems—The Adventure (Story Line Press, 1986; reissued April 2022 by Red Hen Press) and Happiness (Story Line Press, 1998)—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). In print, Pollack’s work has appeared in Hudson Review, 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 and elsewhere. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.
