Fred Pollack

The Notepad


In Goethe’s house, a notepad
of some sort – I forget, I
think they were loose sheets,
not glued at one edge –
by the bedside, under glass.
His writing, thin, slanted,
lightning-like, 
diagonally across them when
some line awoke him.
Reaction beyond envy – all
the resources of my egotism
flushed, the container collapsed.

The closest I come is on the verge
of sleep – my freest,
most distanced ideas;
too tired to write them down.
Of course I’ll remember that
in the morning. No.
(“I too could have been a great painter,”
says an etiolated type
to an almost-no-longer-patient painting friend,
“but my specialty is autumn landscapes
and I’m only inspired in spring.” 
– Blix, Simplicissimus.)

One night in the favored zone I thought,
Don’t create characters.
Let spiritual conundrums
drift by themselves, like vampires or
dybbuks, briefly 
inhabiting human fragments.
Then, asleep, I thought: No,
what characterizes you
is grammar. Complete sentences,
punctuation. Whoever sees you at all 
sees those, instead of the usual 
floating world.

Fred Pollack


The Notepad


In Goethe’s house, a notepad
of some sort – I forget, I
think they were loose sheets,
not glued at one edge –
by the bedside, under glass.
His writing, thin, slanted,
lightning-like, 
diagonally across them when
some line awoke him.
Reaction beyond envy – all
the resources of my egotism
flushed, the container collapsed.

The closest I come is on the verge
of sleep – my freest,
most distanced ideas;
too tired to write them down.
Of course I’ll remember that
in the morning. No.
(“I too could have been a great painter,”
says an etiolated type
to an almost-no-longer-patient painting friend,
“but my specialty is autumn landscapes
and I’m only inspired in spring.” 
– Blix, Simplicissimus.)

One night in the favored zone I thought,
Don’t create characters.
Let spiritual conundrums
drift by themselves, like vampires or
dybbuks, briefly 
inhabiting human fragments.
Then, asleep, I thought: No,
what characterizes you
is grammar. Complete sentences,
punctuation. Whoever sees you at all 
sees those, instead of the usual 
floating world.

Retreat


In some earlier war
we advance on all fronts.
Have matured: no longer believe 
it will be over by Christmas. 
Maybe next, or the next. But we advance,
we’re winning, and the insult
of every moment is joined by the thought
of dying a day, an hour before
peace. Or a pale real image
of how we will live if we do –
wife or none, job or none,
decades of dreams and silence – 
before we force it back into
the homogeneous golden glow of home.

The enemy is locally a gentleman:
if we’re captured he’ll feed us.

And should another training film
without the usual priest/sportscaster voice 
show men in filthy foreign rags with good
machine-guns, bomb-making skills,
and total disdain for life
killing guys like us in deserts,
we would stare at fat body armor,
smart helmets, beautiful tanks,
fast-summoned jets, and think, That isn’t us.
Grandkids perhaps, but not us.
And, turning in sleep – a soldier’s sleep,
brief, welcome, dreamless –
ponder the future term “learning experience,”
which isn’t actually school and can be ignored.