Aztec Joke | Poems
by Frederick Pollack
The Cactus | Along Tenth | The Day Room | Appearing
The Reward | Submission | For P. | The Conference
The Cactus
Was it perhaps a mini-stroke? My previous mild silence in social situations, only broken by anodyne male grunts often enough to keep me accepted, has turned to humor. Drawn from the dusty abandoned frontiers of learning, twisted tales from Continental philosophy (some continent or other), and other cultures, especially those with bigotries. Turkish joke about the Laz, a minority along the Black Sea; it involves buttocks. Setup requires three scholarly minutes, puts listeners into a kind of mental weightlessness or blank-tank, perhaps perceiving personality as a quantified waste of time. Then there’s my Aztec one. Aside from eating people, Aztec society was repressive and censorious. But if you made it past sixty (few did), they let you sit around, blind drunk on pulque, insulting passersby. So one geezer says
Along Tenth
A strong, fortyish fellow (bit of a gym-rat, in fact) wasted time saving his work, then walked down thirty floors, neither having occasion to help anyone nor be helped. Coughing, disoriented by the dust, he made his way slowly across the plaza. Jumpers struck near him, then the North Tower fell. Too preoccupied to remember wife, kids, or phone, he walked the eighty blocks to his condo. He wasn’t religious, and his work had involved trade, dangers to and costs of, in many parts of the world, so his focus had always been on that. What he thought of (“saw”) during this walk wasn’t vengeance — that would be a minor, ongoing part of it — or a growth in understanding (though some phrase like that occurred to him); he understood things. No, what he saw was a beautiful, transparent, rotating cloud. In which those who were eaten knew they were food, and didn’t mind, and loved the mouth, and were loved in return; so that whatever hate they had to feel was a mere seed or skin. He saw crowds dying in grace. He was among them; so was everyone he passed, and he almost embraced and spoke to them. But the love of his wife and kids when he reached home distracted him (he also found he was hungry). The marriage solidified, work returned, and in three years he developed asthma. Faiths bloom every moment in the shadow of what used to be the imagination; some few flourish.
The Day Room
Outside, a sullen wind forms the dust of leaves from many autumns into a fervid vortex like Malczewski’s “Melancholia” — but his figures were martyrs, poets, heroes, while yours are the usual. Their stupidity is such they can’t see you through the window. Which may change, but for now you’re a bystander, next to the real; what is real for a bystander is fear. The room behind you is big, bright, clean, quiet, exempt. Though at your back stands one who could lock your arms, snap your neck, or summon those who would, for the moment he’s invisible, kind. He wonders what you see and you’re smart enough to answer, A bird, and describe it; then wreck it by saying He likes snow, if only as a diversion from chronic near-starvation. And the one behind you mildly asks how you feel about the people out there. They must be mad, you say, to be abroad in such weather, but are warmed — fired — by a shared desire to be alone, sovereign, king and chief rapist each of his tiny country, obeying no law except those cleverly disguised as instinct. As I recover, I’ve learned theirs is the vital bond. And he would answer, counsel, chide, rephrase, but behind him at the big table a patient formerly in the health field weeps, an artist describes at length how a new, gross parody of an old, subtle parody will make her career, a poet crosses out and crosses out lines already heavily crossed and decides that’s the poem, while others protest the hurtful presence of those who think themselves superior. Your keeper turns. The bird is still there — pecks and finds some frozen thing. Its eye meets yours a moment, helping to resolve the Problem of Other Minds.
Pavel Malczewski, Melancholia, 1894
Appearing
Parmenides, appearing in a distant future, looks as he did to Raphael, stern and forceful. He ignores ephemera, smog, cellphones, tyrants, asks only two questions: How might I eat? and Where might I be relatively safe? — not out of pragmatism, but because physical needs are part of fate, which has always already happened. He endorses Einstein’s partial endorsement of him, refutes Smolin with math he picked up somewhere. Which sets some scientists running; others talk eagerly with him, although it’s hard since he omits the future tense. “Spacetime is a block. Yes, there’s a sixth great extinction. No, we all die from fire, thirst, and drowning. The successor species evolves from rats. They don’t have time to develop fully, but are pleasant enough. Joy exists elsewhere, but generally one’s smart enough to keep it to oneself.” One of the scholars (Parmenides doesn’t catch the name of her field) is as lovely as the nameless goddess he invoked. “I suppose,” he says, eating takeout, “you want to protest my patriarchal loathing of process.” “Not at all,” she replies. “I only wonder why the poem that contains us has summoned you in person, not just your idea.”
The Reward
The reward of the historicist is to read obsolete poems on JSTOR and become the poet’s new best friend by buying him drinks. It’s summer, the cloudy ale almost cool from its cask. The tide recedes, the Thames stinks, but only the historicist notices. A sergeant-major obviously off to the colonies wipes his mustache on his wrist, emotions reconstructable though complex like those of the whores outside. The poet loosens neither tie nor vest, both worse for wear. He has a week before a horse-cab, less absurd than a colleague’s fall from a bar-stool, beats syphilis to him. Opinions about darkies and Israelites are there, but pleasantly subordinated to despair. He accepts being questioned however rudely by a chap from the future, especially when the latter relates how revered the work will be, taught in schools; rattles off the titles of critical studies. Sated, dabbing away a tear, the poet asks questions of his own, untypically (from all that is known of him) generous. No war with France, he is assured; the new, more distant enemy turned aside, replete with retailed colonies; balloons filling the air, a Workers’ Earth . . . . The pub, the river, poet, sergeant, whores and endless clop and cursing fade again into the quietness around the historicist, who has no love for pain.
Submission
I used to have a character called the Elitist.
He was witty, snarky, and generally alone.
He never signaled virtue, since
he had no currently valued virtue
to signal; and though he never
said anything un-p.c., you were always
afraid he might. So he never caught on
with editors.
I’ve been thinking
of reviving him. He sits across a wide
bare glass aggressive uncompromising
desk from his afternoon appointments.
“Did you really think I’d be interested
in this?” he snarls, returning a stack
of manuscript. It depicts
mild bourgeois horrors. Is barely literate
according to an ancient standard (his), and
hand-written — she thought the strain
of doing it that way would prove
sincerity and pain. He turns
to the boy, who seems undecided
between pseudo-hipster loose and corporate tight,
and has a film. It’s a mashup
(as its maker would say) of everything — games, posts,
instas, grades, failed
vacations, prescriptions; “at least no guns,”
the Elitist growls. On the verge
of dissolution, the two young people
glance at each other, thinking he’s just
an asshole; but the next supplicant
is also old — it’s unclear
what he has, but the Elitist tears him a new one.
He looks out his enormous window. Below,
amidst regimented trees, families, couples,
potential couples genteelly glide,
then, as if at a signal, turn
to ravening hordes. The moon is visible.
Perhaps, he thinks, I should demote
Art from its position of primacy
again to be a subaltern of Nature.
For P.
Amazed that you don’t recall the risk of breaking an axle on our impossible descent into that impossibly pink canyon at Sedona. And you, that I’m blank about a great-aunt’s last appearance at some niece’s bat mitzvah; while neither of us is sure in which Latin city . . . You, likewise, your cellphone, me the other notebook or my pills, but that’s how it goes: if you forget, I remember; if I forget, you remember.
The Conference
Though jetlagged and grimy, I’m not driven to the hotel to shower, sleep, and schmooze with fellow poets, but to a windowless grey basement. Beneath a swinging hanging bulb I confront what looks like the criminal element though it insists it’s official. “You’re here for the Conference,” says the boss, an obvious sociopath; asks in their language if I speak the language. I don’t, “but I love some of your classics. In translation,” I burble, naming names; he points out with a smile that they’re all dead. “Using what you know of our culture, I’d like you to adopt the point of view of one of our poets. What would he or, excuse me, they write about?” The picture on the wall behind him may be the Palace or some mall. “Well,” I say, “the poets at your universities are probably linked to the international avant-garde, which currently tends—” He shifts in his chair, exposing a .38. “Otherwise I’m sure they write about their grandparents and parents,” I go on, “if they’re around, or if not, depending on why they aren’t; and . . . cows, and your beautiful scenery, and endlessly about childhood—” One of the goons makes a slapping gesture as if missing a cosh. “And what do you think,” asks the chief, “is the underlying theme of these poems?” Insofar as a madman can ask a serious question, this one is, and I ponder a moment. “‘Don’t hurt me.’”
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both from Story Line Press; the former to be reissued by Red Hen Press. Two collections of shorter poems, A Poverty of Words, (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Pollack’s work has appeared in Salmagundi, 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 (2007, 2016, 2020) Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, etc.
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