Something must be brought him.
A sealed box
holds it, careful hands
take it out, gloved, careful,
devoted hands turn
the pages. He is imagined bending
towards it, disastrously drooling,
mumbling. Actually he isn’t
that bad, or old, but such is the image
of someone who retains his expertise.
He knows it’s what they see. Thinks,
They should be more concerned
that the other book, the book of my life,
has become so dull that I’m not sure I’ll finish.
Don’t imagine this happening
in a secluded room
as of some elegant, occult
underground. For everything but ownership
is public now, and mobs peer howling
from the other side of screens.
They hate that the figure reads, or can,
and isn’t among the images
that serve them as words.
And since he isn’t, he is all the more
part of an ever-ramifying
conspiracy. The speed of their hatred
generates the warmth that has
replaced, or perhaps always constituted,
the famous human warmth.
He reads so intensely he might be writing,
with the speed of one inspired,
and as he reads he translates.
Fanatic acolytes take down
the ancient precious words known only to him
but always, he claims, intended
for others. They tell the story of a hero.
Born in the usual shadow,
he must kill worse than usual monsters
before he comes into an inheritance
which isn’t only his but that
of the hungriest crowd, and on the way find love.
When those outside read
these words, counsels the sage,
they’ll no longer bay for our blood.
But while he dictates he is also reading
and basing plans upon
what the old book really contains,
which is no story, has nothing to do
with story, certainly not one
that will change the narrative of
the foe. That foe who in the book is merely
the dross of time, equivalent to the whole,
which is contained in what the text
refers to as the noble reader.
That reader death may touch but not impress,
whose vengeance is elsewhere, as is
the understanding of others. Those others
who end, he thinks, like a familiar story,
perhaps the one just told.
About the Author
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.
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