1
It’s 6:30, which means things
are getting serious. Not necessarily
a crisis – only a report, prospectus,
due diligence. And that sense,
however familiar and subdued,
of rededication: quick wash, second shave,
swipe of hand sanitizer. The slacks that appear,
turning into the aisle
between the cubicles the next room over,
are a woman’s. Is she loyal, will she stay?
… no, she’s gone,
down to a block of freezing rain
before her cab or subway. Four
in the window office
remain. A neocon
I knew once became almost tearful,
praising the connotations of the word
company. The eldest
(I think) has slung his jacket
over a chair. The possible
young hope, young blood, or someone’s
idiot nephew gestures –
a repeated downward pump or jab.
Striped shirt never moves. Green tie
shifts once, is still.
No laptops, stenograph, speakerphone, realtime
output, which means this
is serious? or that drinks
and dinner are delayed somewhere
for ideas? Their wall is bare
and white. In these blocks, no
“green” enterprises, NGOs, pro bono; so
one knows, more or less, who they are … Now the Old Man
looks out and down
at the rain puddling the twentieth-floor setback,
then at my hotel, at me,
whom at this distance (mystery is distance)
he can’t see.
2
The espresso machine like a Victorian monument
bronzed, the tables like Braque’s guéridons,
the display case for cannoli,
the notional chairs and between-table spaces,
the walls brown from the smoking ages,
the waiters’ trance, and this stretch of MacDougal
don’t change with the decades. But today
the place seems given to a private party,
quiet and unannounced. The kid
with his absurd beret and the one-volume
Schopenhauer he doesn’t so much read
as carry, the more or less fat
guys with their Marx and journals,
and a few older men
seem at least in one sense together –
they have eyes only for each other
(and for the long-haired girl in a pleated skirt
who doesn’t appear). Though no two glances meet.
One probes a pocket for the number
at which he must call his father
from a payphone; another for his cellphone, to call
his wife. The kid perhaps ponders;
the thirty-something and forty-something read;
another stops because the light’s too dim.
They take out notebooks and write,
or try to. Is that how they communicate?
They’d deny it …
(Outside, some sort of demonstration passes
without a break, and fades;
no one comes in. There’s no one to talk to, ever.)
If they did write each other,
what would they say? “You can’t write anything here.
If you do, you’ll reject it later
as sentimental.” Seeing which, the boy rises,
surreptitiously tucks in his too-tight
turtleneck, fills his bookbag,
and leaves, expression resolute and dreamy
because that’s expected of him.
3
Actually, we don’t discuss
the obvious: arthritis drawing
cries from him whenever he canes
himself up, and slightly hobbling
my own step when I cross the room
to fetch some book he has pointed to.
Or loneliness, or politics – the bullies
that roam the body and the world will have
their way, and meanwhile jabber;
we ignore them, though they strain and shape
all speech. He has grown very white
since our last meeting, fifteen years
and hundreds of emails ago, I very gray.
The relics of his lover, who had disliked me
on sight, lie small and quaint
amid the clutter, and a ghost informs
the collages – ties, real ties imposed on penciled –
he’s doing. He gives me one.
Reads new poems, vers-de-société
of hell and the low slopes of purgatory.
Paws what I bought
at the Strand: Stead’s work since his stroke, Matthias
sounding old, old. “Always the tourist,” he smiles.
“You’re scoping out the terminal wards.”
– “I want to see how much they transcend
the personal, and if not, why they can’t.” –
“Perhaps because there’s nothing else,” he says,
provoking. – And one or two
young free-associaters, who have no story
but the stupid one the world imposes,
“but at least aren’t chuckleheads”:
thus I defend them, and bore him.
He rarely leaves the apartment;
is interested when I describe
the cardboard, low-grade porn and verathaned
ads at the New Museum
on the rapidly gentrifying Bowery. “’Unmonumental’ –
that’s what they call the show. The wall-text
talks about art ‘responsive to an age
of broken icons.’ It struck me
there’s a contradiction in that.”
– “The longer I live, or last,” he says,
“the more I address one question
to whatever I see and read:
would anything be lost if this didn’t exist?
If the answer is no, burn it.”
We have been drinking all this time:
one glass each, slowly. Now he offers
another, but I have to go.
Once more I praise his recent work.
“I was glad to meet you again,” he says.
“You seem to be more yourself than I remember.”
I tell him teaching helped. And poetry.
“Not an afterthought,” he smiles. Stands, painfully;
we embrace as if we’ll meet again.
Afternoon sun
pours down the airshaft to his window.
4
They queue, for rock clubs, movies,
all-you-can-eat restaurants, even
the tchotchke shops, to buy Liberty
in snow-globes, foam, or pre-aged bronze.
The lines intersect the crowds,
so dense and slowed they feel
as in dreams that the illusion of movement
will fail any moment.
Their coats absorb the smudged and trodden
colors, poor relations of those above.
To the east, the shows are letting out –
the fishnet dancers in Cook County jail,
a lion cub becoming king,
a sexless lover with a mask – their music,
in the minds of the new crowds exiting,
merging at the corner with the noise.
The new Stoppard may or may not
have taught that rock-and-roll is freedom;
that one can relax into freedom
if one abandons murderous ideals.
A couple next to us, with strict ideas
of entertainment, squirmed at allusions
to unfamiliar dates and names,
to history, and left at intermission.
There are cabs, but they rage,
like other cars, for movement;
we’ll take the E or 6 or walk
crosstown to our hotel –
the cold rejuvenating us,
sustaining another hour
the feeling that friends, drinks, dinner,
window-shopping, the theater can go on.
Call it joy, whose center is above
this corner, all its plasma screens
broadcasting fragments of it: cars, breasts,
the sea, disembodied dancing
handbags, market shares, wise commentators,
an ecstatic Riemannian geometry
of colors, colors, colors one yearns
to rise and merge and splinter into,
all motion effortless and theirs, reflected
in the faces now surrounding us, blasé
or brooding, avid for the possible.
Frederick Pollack was born in Chicago. He is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press. Other poems and essays have appeared in Fulcrum, Hudson Review, Representations, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), Gladhat, Malleable Jangle, Famous Reporter and elsewhere. He is adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University, Washington, DC.
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