Frederick Pollack

A Consul Reports

1

One party upholds the primacy
of the heat-death at the end of time,
the Cold and the Dark; its banner is black.
When someone points out that this was the color of Anarchism,
the leaders of this intensely conservative party
say that Black absorbs all movements.
The other party emphasizes
the drought that will end civilization,
the Desert that will be
the final face of our planet; its color is gold.
Which also occasions humor – they’re mild red-greens.
Whichever group is in power, the city runs
as quietly and cleanly as its river.
Dispute accrues to bribes: what’s correct,
when Blacks rule, for policemen and landlords; under
the Duns, for officials.
Tourists who don’t understand the system
account for most of my calls.

2

The position of the church is hard to make out.
So, I might add, is its creed.
On a dusty, dog-haunted
street near the cathedral I was
accosted by one in clerical beige,
not young, not fanatic. He asked how I found the city.
I made proper noises. He asked
if I was satisfied how far and fast
I’d risen in my country’s service;
shouldn’t I be by now an Ambassador,
Foreign Minister? Appalled but smiling,
I asked how pleased he was with his status.
“Not a bit!” he exclaimed, laughing.
“The demands of my flock are too much for me.
Often, I want to sit –
among the dozens who come each day
from the country for this purpose –
by a merely whitewashed, unblessed, unfrescoed
bit of wall; a traditional posture
in which to admit defeat, a good place to die.”

3

But the most egregious rebels –
they have agents in the church and both parties –
are those who want to open
the whole land to global capital.
Several of their pamphlets
have come into my possession. One
imagines how much more vital and properly
irrational Church will be, full
of people with their eyes shut, waving
their arms, merged with an unambiguous
Savior! Another, addressing
women, points out that,
elsewhere, girls were transformed from flyblown
kolkhozniks to effective sophisticated
whores in less than a decade. But
more generally, these documents
(the country is closed to “media”) appeal
to anyone, everyone. You can exchange
loneliness for suspicion, despair
for hatred, the tedium
of anything collective for feverish
action, the empty sky for your own image;
remember that “the likeliest ending”
(as Musk Himself has said) “is the most entertaining.”

Snowball’s Chance

The cold holds steady, but clouds come in
like mercy, even amnesty;
the morning blue was all
surveillance camera and searchlight.
Weather now, whether cruel or briefly
forgiving, always seems conscious:
detached from habit, uncertain what to do.
There is so much that needs
to be punished. Creatures like the one
who disproved global warming
by molding, before his fellow laughing senators,
a snowball will of course be punished last.

As the grey settles, you for one
expand. But in the cloud, you meet
others: the addict. The one who simply
accepted that he had failed. The bad father.
The one who made a lot of money
and dressed well. The already dead, looking stupid.
And all of them, with some organ severed,
another hypertrophied, wrong, are you.
In fading light, you seek
one who could most dispassionately judge
the rest. It’s a trick, mostly, of facial expression,
the eyebrows. You fake it.

 

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), 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). Many other poems in print and online journals (Misfit 2014, '19, '21, '22).