The room where you work is yours absolutely: 
no rent or mortgage; no one enters. 
You try to keep it neat, 
but soup overflowed onto the hotplate 
at one point, and insects 
die between the window and the screen. 
The window mostly shows what’s there, 
but in times of stress it conveys 
crazed mobs, disturbed passersby 
(who are not, as yet, beneath precisely 
that window), making rude gestures, 
waving flags, preparing to fire; 
their most brilliant representatives 
at their moment of greatest brilliance asking 
what you think you’re doing. 

The ant crossing your desk is so alone 
that for now, perhaps, you needn’t fear the hive. 
Can one so small be called intensely 
alive? It becomes an explorer 
of a world so bare the act of discovery 
is pure: there’s nothing here 
to extract, no one to enslave. 
Absurd the heavy gear of the conquistador; 
absurd the gaze of Empire 
on the botanist’s pith helmet, his raddled 
tie. Space fills with memories, 
anecdotal, loving, 
disjunct, explaining nothing. 
Let them remain unorganized: 
death is the price of data. 

But then that surface, which absorbs the room, 
breeds dustmite creatures, sullen and contentious, 
but who, unlike us, 
weary of fighting, collapse and discuss 
(their tiny voices reaching 
your inclined, enormous ear), 
the grounds of conflict, which for them, 
who have so few resources, are the past. 
“Wouldn’t He be happier communing 
with ghosts? One can negotiate 
with ghosts.” “Or going outside?” 
“If He did they’d tear Him apart, 
if only, they might say, to find a heart.” 
(They talk about you thus as a religious 
way of avoiding themselves, and hubris.) 

Abandoning the brave or timid 
promptings of your desk, you rise and pace, 
which is your journey and your way of walking. 
The books you pass wither like fruit, 
each to a single word 
that sinks into the walls and joins the past, 
which was the preparation of a threat. 
Outside the day hangs like humidity. 
You wonder when it will be cool again 
and dry as narrow caverns time creates 
in order to forget. 
Haze from the latest fire is blurring 
everything beyond the nearest leaves. 
One who sees only what is there 
feels at the end he saw nothing. 

* Publisher’s Note:

Epigraph is from The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations (Die Fleigenpein: Aufzeichnungen) by Elias Canetti, translated from the German by H. F. Broch de Rothermann; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1994).

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 three collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015), Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and The Beautiful Losses (Better Than Starbucks Books, forthcoming September 2023).

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, Misfit, OffCourse, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Big Pond Rumours (Canada), and elsewhere.

Author’s website: https://www.frederickpollack.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ “Challenging the poverty of words: Interview with progressive poet Frederick Pollack” by Michael Berkowitz in People’s World (12 January 2022)