Lucidity

At any moment, all the poems

you could ever write hover

between you and the leaf-strewn lawns,

bland prospects of your neighborhood,

the more distant abstractions

of politics, the horror

of age.  They’re a kind

of counter-broadcasting, a cable channel

no one is watching, including you.

A baby’s abandoned mitten

on a low stone ledge

could theoretically

fill infinite metaphors, but all

you think about is that oppressive

infinity and Borges.

Two nymphets chatter, wearing

the same pink T-shirt in some kind

of solidarity; they are

attended by the gods

of genetics, who hopefully

will guide the sinews of the blonde, the blobs

of the redhead to beauty.  At outside tables,

the professional faces

above dogs, beside phones,

could be tiles in a wall

of supreme compassion but aren’t;

they read and you create

the dull poem of the world,

that aimless epic.  In an eccentric orbit

between the outer gasbags and the sun,

one day a ship appears.  It’s huge,

and transmitting garbage.  Its presence

unites mankind, i.e., all chiefs of staff.

Eventually we decode.  He’s big,

a kind of soulful jellyfish starfish

floating repulsively in a tank.

His race is dying.  He wants our help.  We give none.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, "The Adventure" and "Happiness", both published by Story Line Press.  Other of his poems and essays have appeared in Hudson Review, Southern Review, Fulcrum, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), Representations and elsewhere.  Poems have most recently appeared in the print journals Iota (UK), Orbis (UK), Naked Punch (UK), and The Hat, are forthcoming in Magma (UK). Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Snorkel, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Denver Syntax, Barnwood, elimae, Wheelhouse and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in Mudlark. Pollack is an adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University, Washington, DC.